Bound By Passion

When that summer had ended and Reid had disappeared from her life, he’d remained the hero in all the stories she’d woven for years to come. Knowing full well that, at six, she’d seen Reid Sutherland through rose-colored Disney-movie glasses.

A dozen years later when his mother had married her father beneath Angus and Eleanor’s stone arch, the way she’d seen Reid had been entirely different. He was no longer just a good-looking boy. He’d turned into an incredibly attractive man. While their parents recited vows, she found her gaze returning to him again and again. She hadn’t been able to stop herself. Even now, years later, she could easily conjure up the image of that lean, raw-boned face, the tousled dark hair. The full, firm mouth.

And she could still remember what she’d felt— dryness in her throat, rapid beat to her heart and the strangest melting sensation in her body. When he had glanced over and met her gaze, she’d felt that flutter right beneath her heart, and she’d been certain that she was falling in love with him all over again.

A mistake that could be excused in a naive eighteen-year-old who’d never felt such strong attraction for a man before. Thank heavens she’d never let him or anyone else know that he’d twice been the object of her heart’s desire. He always thought of her as a child; someone he felt indulgent toward. Someone he had to go out of his way to protect from harm. After their parents’ wedding, he’d made his feelings for her quite clear when he’d kissed her on the nose and called her “my new little stepsister.”

Those words had crushed her heart, and inspired by one of Adair’s plans, she’d put pen to paper and created a very different narrative about Reid Sutherland.

Nell took another sip of her icy coffee as the memory poured into her mind in vivid detail. It had been midnight when Adair and Piper had come to her room and awakened her. The wedding guests had long-ago departed, and their aunt Vi was sound asleep. Piper had swiped a bottle of champagne, and they’d gone out to the stone arch, the way they’d done so many times growing up. But with cola or tea in their childhood years.

Beneath the stones, they’d shared their goals and dreams and secrets. More than that, at Adair’s suggestion, they’d written down those goals and put them in their mother’s old jewelry box. As children, they’d tucked the box behind some stones that were loose to tap into the power that resided there. Back then, Adair had come up with the idea of burying all their secret goals in the stones. The theory had been that, if the stone arch had the power to bring true lovers together, it might also have the power to make other dreams come true. Even the very practical-minded Piper had decided that it was worth a shot.

Nell had continued to tuck her goals into the box even after her sisters had gone away to college. Since it was divided into three compartments, it was perfect for their purpose. Adair had insisted from the beginning that they each use a different color paper to ensure privacy. Piper had chosen blue, Adair yellow and Nell had selected pink.

On the night of the wedding, it was Adair, of course, who had suggested that they cap the celebration by writing out their most secret and thrilling sexual fantasy. Perhaps Nell’s fantasy had evolved as it did because she had been standing in the exact same spot when her gaze had locked with Reid’s during the ceremony. Maybe because the memory of what she’d felt was still so fresh—that rush of desire, the glorious wave of heat and the flutter right beneath her heart. Or perhaps it had been the champagne. But, of course, her sexual fantasy had involved Reid Sutherland.

And that night she’d been creatively inspired. Her best story ideas came to her while she was actually writing. The physical acts of running her pen over the paper or her fingers atop the keyboard tapped into her creative imagination the way nothing else did. And she’d certainly tapped into it that night. Nell had been eighteen, a freshman in college, and what she’d written went far beyond her limited experience. The details of those original fantasies were a bit fuzzy now. But the setting she’d chosen and the broader picture were perfectly clear.

No longer was Reid the romantic hero of her childhood fairy tales. No, indeed. In her fantasy, seduction had been her goal. And she’d chosen the most romantic setting she could think of—Eleanor’s garden. Over the years, she’d had plenty of time to embroider and expand on her original ideas. And those scenarios had been fueling her dreams, especially since the Sutherland men had reentered her sisters’ lives.

Of course what she’d felt that day could have been a onetime thing. But working against that theory was the fact that every time she relived it in her mind, she felt the same things all over again. No one before or since had ever made her want with such intensity. With that feeling of inevitability.

The question was, when she finally met Reid again, what would happen next? Each time she asked it, a fresh thrill rippled through her system. As a writer, it was the question she always wanted foremost in her readers’ minds. It was what made them turn the page. And she found that the more she thought about it, the more she wanted to turn the page in her own life and discover what would happen.

Just thinking about it had her reaching again for her drink to cool down her system. She hadn’t seen Reid since their parents’ wedding day. His job heading up the vice president’s security team made him a very busy man. Still she had no doubt that they would meet again sometime soon, and she would have the opportunity to turn her fantasies into reality. And she’d made preparations.

A heady thrill moved through her at the thought.

“Earth to Nell.”

Piper’s words made Nell shift her gaze to the letters Piper was placing in her briefcase. Giving herself a mental shake, Nell refocused on the fact that she was currently involved in a much more pressing narrative.

“Duncan wants to see both letters. We’ll take a taxi to Reid’s office, and he’ll meet us there.” She left two bills on the table to pay for their coffees.

“Reid’s office? Why do we have to go there?” Nell asked.

“It’s halfway between Duncan’s office and here. Plus Duncan says Reid’s on vacation, and he’s going to the castle with you.”

In her mind, Nell pictured a guardian angel swooping down on her. “I don’t need anyone to protect me. I can handle this.”

“Don’t be silly.” Punching another number into her phone, Piper moved quickly toward the curb. “Abe, I’m going to be a little late for work. Family emergency.”

Family emergency? Nell frowned. Nell grabbed one last swallow of chocolate-laced caffeine and rose from her seat.

Piper turned back to her. “The best place to catch a taxi is at the opposite corner. Follow me.”

Then she stepped in between two parked cars to wait for traffic to clear.

A horn blast drew Nell’s attention. A few stores down, a dark sedan was blocking traffic. The driver behind him demonstrated his displeasure by leaning on the horn again. Piper glanced at the noise also and then turned her attention back to her phone call.

Nell had only taken one step when a woman came up to her. “Ms. MacPherson? You are Nell MacPherson, right?”

“Yes, I am.”

The woman was a tall brunette in her early fifties who looked as if she could have stepped right off the cover of a high-end fashion magazine. “I missed your signing, and I was wondering if you could autograph a book for my granddaughter?”

“Of course.”

While the woman fished in her bag for the book and a pen, Nell heard the horn again and the sound of a motor revving. She caught a blur of movement out of the corner of her eye. The image of the dark sedan shooting forward had barely registered, when she realized that Piper was directly in its path. Fear flashed so brightly in her mind that for a moment she was blinded. Pure instinct had her pushing past the woman and racing toward the street.

Piper seemed so far away, the sound of the car so close. Nell felt as if she was moving in slow motion, the car on fast-forward. She slammed into her sister, grabbing her around the waist and using Nell’s momentum to hurl them both forward. They were airborne for a second. Holding tight to Piper, Nell twisted so that she took the impact on her side when they tumbled onto the pavement. Then with every ounce of energy she had, she rolled, dragging her sister with her. Hot wind seared her cheek, and she smelled burning rubber as the dark sedan whipped past and sped up the street.

“Nell? Are you all right?”

Pain was singing through every bone in her body, but Nell managed a smile as she opened her eyes and looked into Piper’s. “I’m fine. You?”

“Yeah,” Piper said. “Thanks to you.”

“He was crazy,” a man said as he helped both of them to their feet.

Piper ran her hands over her sister. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“I’m better than I was a moment ago.” Nell didn’t want to ever replay those few seconds in her mind again.

For a moment Piper just held on to her sister’s hands. There was a look in her eyes that Nell had never seen before. Surprise?

“You saved my life,” Piper said. “I guess you were right about it being just as dangerous here as at the castle.”

“It’s all good,” Nell said as she pulled her sister close and just held on to her for a minute.

“I wrote down his license plate number,” a woman said. “It looked to me like he wanted to run you over, young lady. You should report him.”

“I will.” Pulling away from Nell, Piper took the slip of paper.

“I called 9-1-1,” another woman said. “They’re sending the police to take a report.”

Glancing around, Nell noted that they’d attracted quite a little crowd. On the edge of it, she saw a young man pushing forward. As he reached her, she saw that he had an envelope in his hand. “Sorry, lady,” he said. “The guy in that car gave me this to deliver to you after you left the café. He paid me fifty bucks and told me to wait until you crossed the street. I had no idea he was going to try to run you down.”

“Thanks,” Nell said. But it wasn’t her the driver had been aiming for. It had been Piper.

“Let me open it for you,” Piper said, then pulled out her phone to call Duncan once more.

“No.” This was her story, and if she’d had any lingering doubts about that, they vanished as she read the message on the letter inside.

You have forty-eight hours to find the sapphire necklace, or you run the risk of losing another member of your family.

4

HORNS BLASTED AS Reid made an illegal left-hand turn that would cut five minutes off his trip to Piper MacPherson’s apartment in Georgetown, near the latest Stuart sapphires crime scene. Now if he could just make it through the next few traffic lights. He cut off a car in the right lane, pressed his foot on the gas and shot through a yellow one. Duncan’s ringtone had him grabbing his cell just as he headed into one of D.C.’s traffic circles.

“I’m still ten minutes out,” Duncan said.

“I’ll be there in less than five.” Reid slammed on his brakes as the car in front of him slowed. “I’ll let you know the second I arrive.” He dropped his cell on the passenger seat and concentrated on snaking his way through the traffic.

He should have told Duncan to have the two women wait for him where they were, as soon as he’d first heard about the first two threatening letters. Why hadn’t he? He seldom had to second-guess himself. His success in the Secret Service depended on him being right the first time.

But this particular scenario simply hadn’t occurred to him. The writer of the letters had threatened Nell’s family if she didn’t locate the rest of Eleanor’s sapphires and hand them over to their rightful owner. It was a good ploy. It would have probably scared her into taking a shot at finding the necklace ASAP. Who would have thought the writer would try to make good on his threat within the hour?

He should have, Reid thought. When his cell rang again, he grabbed it.

“Piper just called me again,” Duncan said. “Nell asked the officer who responded to the attempted hit-and-run complaint to stay until one of us gets there.”

“Smart,” Reid said.

“Yeah, but we should have been smarter. I had Piper put the officer on the line. He filled me in on what the eyewitnesses saw. They say the driver of the car accelerated as soon as Piper stepped into the street—as if he’d been waiting for her. He would have run her down if Nell hadn’t tackled her and gotten her out of the way.”

Reid heard a thread of panic in his brother’s voice he’d never heard before. “The important thing is that Piper’s alive and unharmed.” But he was thinking of Nell, the little fairy-tale princess of a girl he’d done his best to protect that long-ago summer. The image of her tackling her sister didn’t quite gel with that. Nor did it fit with the fragile-looking teenage girl he recalled standing beneath the stone arch as their parents had taken their wedding vows.

“I knew there was another shoe that had to drop,” Duncan said. “I should have known something like this might happen. The facts are all there. It’s just that the attacks on Adair and Piper occurred at the castle, and only after they’d each found one of the earrings.”

Reid had reviewed the same things in his own mind, until it had become a continuous loop. He’d first suggested they come to his office to get them out of the neighborhood. But he should have—

“I knew Deanna Lewis was working with someone,” Duncan continued. “I knew they were obsessed with getting their hands on the Stuart sapphires. I should have—”

Reid cut his brother off by saying, “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been blaming myself for not going there right after you called about the letters.” Not that he would have gotten there in time. But he’d be there now.

There was a beat of silence on the other end of the line. Then Duncan said, “You’ve been blaming yourself?”

“That’s what I said.” With one hand, Reid eased the car out of the traffic circle.

“Wait. I’m going to punch the record button on my phone. Would you mind repeating that?”

“You can always dream, bro. And if you even breathe a word of that little confession to Cam, I’ll deny it. Then I’ll have to beat you up.”

“You can always dream, bro.”

With the panic in Duncan’s voice replaced by humor, some of Reid’s tension eased. But traffic had slowed to a crawl. Two blocks ahead, he saw the revolving lights of a patrol car. “I’m within sight of the apartment. I’ll update you soon.”

Reid jammed his car into a No Standing zone, jumped out and ran down the sidewalk.

NELL TURNED THE flame on beneath the teakettle on Piper’s stove. She preferred coffee, but the ritual of making tea had always soothed her nerves. It brought back memories of the times she’d talked through her problems while she’d watched her aunt Vi brewing a pot in Castle MacPherson. Nell had spent a lot of time in the sunny kitchen after her sisters had left for college.

Adair had been the first to leave. Nell and Piper had shared one more year before Piper had deserted her, too. Then for her last two years of high school, she’d been alone. Of course, she’d still had her aunt Vi. And her father had been there, tucked away in his rooms painting or teaching some art classes at nearby Huntleigh College. But there’d been no one to sneak out to the stone arch with in the middle of the night, no one to laugh with as they’d written down their hopes and goals and dreams on different-colored papers and buried them.

Spotting the teapot in Piper’s kitchen, Nell lifted it off the shelf, then nearly dropped it because her hands were trembling. So far she’d been able to hide that little fact from her sister. Since Piper’s clothes looked as if they’d wiped the street, she was showering and changing before Duncan arrived.

Thank heavens Nell’s own navy suit was made of some kind of miracle fabric she could roll up into a ball, stuff into a duffel bag and then shake out wrinkle-free. It had been perfect for her lifestyle during the past year. All she’d had to do to repair the damage from their close encounter with that wannabe hit-and-run driver was to sponge off a few spots of dust with cold water.

If only all her problems were that easy to solve. Tea, she reminded herself, as she searched through the cupboards and finally located the box. When it slipped through her fingers and landed on the floor, she retrieved it and set it gingerly on the counter. Pressing her palms flat on the ledge, she took a deep, calming breath.

She had to settle down. Once the nice young officer had taken their statements and escorted them up the alley stairs to her sister’s apartment above a Georgetown boutique, her knees had begun to feel very weak.

A perfectly normal reaction, she’d told herself.

Someone was threatening her family. She hadn’t heeded the warning in that first letter fast enough, and they’d taken action, nearly succeeding in killing Piper. Now that the initial adrenaline rush had worn off, shaking hands and wobbly knees were understandable.

But the butterflies in her stomach weren’t just due to what had nearly happened in the street. They’d started frantically flapping their wings when Piper had told her that Reid Sutherland was on his way over. He would arrive momentarily.

Nell thought she’d have more time to prepare for meeting him again, time to think and to map out possible scenarios. Find the necklace first. Then deal with Reid Sutherland. Closing her eyes, she drew in another breath. The way she saw it, her problem was twofold. If he came to the castle with her, he posed a threat to her plan to prove to her family that she could take care of herself. The other problem was more personal. She wanted very much to bring to life her fantasies about seducing Reid. They couldn’t be denied. Wouldn’t be denied. But the last thing she needed to deal with right now was her attraction to him. She needed to find that necklace.

On her own.

Reid might present a challenge there, too. The Reid she remembered had made all her decisions for her. And she’d let him.

She couldn’t allow that to happen again. No way was she going to slip into her old habit of letting others involve themselves in her life and control it.

The sudden shriek of the teakettle made her jump. But it also jarred a thought loose. In a well-plotted story, the heroine never has the luxury of time to plan everything out.

She had to face the unexpected—and improvise. That was the key to a good page-turner.

It was also the key to becoming the truly independent woman she wanted to be. A girl would want to separate the two problems and solve them one at a time. A woman would take on the challenge of juggling two or three agendas.

Anyway, why not? A thrill moved through her just thinking about it. There had to be a way to find the necklace and fulfill that fantasy she’d written seven years ago. She’d just have to find it.

Turning off the kettle, she refocused her attention on making tea and noted with some satisfaction that her hands were steadier as she poured water into the china pot. Though the specific details of the sexual narratives she’d buried seven years ago remained a bit fuzzy, her overall goal was still crystal clear. That one searing look Reid had given her ages ago had awakened a desire in her that couldn’t be denied. Wouldn’t be denied.

All she had to do was find a way to convince him. She measured out tea leaves into a tea ball. As she swirled some of the hot water in the teapot to warm it first, then tipped out the water into the sink, she noted that her hands were perfectly steady.

Good. But this was not the time to wonder how it might feel when she ran them over Reid Sutherland’s skin. After carefully adding boiling water to the china pot then adding the tea ball, she turned back to face the table. She had a much more pressing problem.

Someone had tried to run Piper down with a car.

Before her sister had gone into the bedroom to change, Nell had spread out all three letters carefully on the table so that when Duncan and Reid arrived, they could examine the evidence. The third letter frightened her the most.

Losing another member of your family.

The man who’d gunned his car straight at Piper wasn’t fooling around.

Neither was she. Nell welcomed the spurt of anger. She turned back to the counter, opened a drawer, and located a pad of paper and a pen. From the time she’d first learned to write words, she’d made it a habit to capture her ideas on paper. Moving to the table, she read the third letter again.

This time it was something else entirely that jumped out at her.

Forty-eight hours.

That was the important part of the message. Why hadn’t she absorbed it sooner? A ticking clock was a literary device many writers and moviemakers used. She wrote the number on the pad. The writer of this story wanted to put pressure on her to find the necklace fast.

The sudden knock at the door had her nearly dropping her pen.

“Duncan made good time,” Piper called from the bedroom. “I’ll be right out.”

Nell set down her pad and pen on the counter, before she moved to the door and opened it. It wasn’t Duncan standing there. It was Reid. For the first time in her life, she experienced what it was like to be struck dumb. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Lucky for her, his attention was focused on the young officer who’d agreed to stand guard outside on the landing.

Hers was focused on Reid. She might have been transported back in time. Except he wasn’t the same. On that day, her eyes had been riveted on a twenty-two-year-old boy on the edge of manhood. Right now she was looking at a man. Perhaps the most intimidating man that she’d ever seen. His shoulders were broader, his face leaner, the angles more defined. Even the long rangy body was more muscled.

Harder. That’s what it was, she decided. Reid Sutherland looked bigger and harder than she had remembered him being. He was definitely not storybook prince material anymore. Those characters were never scary. And Reid was—just a little. When he turned, and she met his gaze, she realized that one thing was exactly the same. He could still make her throat go dry, make her bones melt in that strange way, and she had to press a hand to her heart when it gave that little flutter.

“Nell?”

She realized that she wasn’t going to get his name past the dryness in her throat.

“Reid, come in.” Piper joined her at the door. “The letters are on the table. Duncan?”

“On his way.”

As Nell stepped aside and let Piper lead Reid into the kitchen, she felt a rush of relief. Her legs were working. He was standing in the tiny kitchen shrugging out of his suit jacket. Just to make sure she could, she shifted her gaze to Piper. Then she thanked the young officer who’d allowed Reid up the stairs.

No worries. Her body was working again. Any moment now her brain would catch up. It was all going to be good. She turned back to the kitchen. Reid stood in profile, leaning over the table reading the letters. He looked every bit as attractive and dangerous from the side as he had face-to-face. Her gaze went to the gun that he wore in a shoulder holster.

Of course he wore a gun. And of course he looked dangerous and intimidating. That was his job. What surprised her was she found the whole package incredibly arousing. She was just going to have to get used to the dry throat, the heat pooling in her center and the fluttering sensation beneath her heart.

Focus.

Following the direction of Reid’s gaze, she looked at the three threatening notes on the table. They were what she had to concentrate on now.

* * *

HALF AN HOUR later, Reid leaned a hip against the counter in the tiny kitchen. The table offered two seats and as soon as his brother had arrived, Reid had encouraged Piper and Duncan to sit. Both of them were shaken up. Not surprising since two attempts had now been made on Piper’s life in the past ten days.

Duncan was currently on the phone with a friend of his, Detective Mike Nelson, who was officially handling the case. One of his officers had already placed the three letters in evidence bags and taken them away. Reid was sure there wouldn’t be any prints, other than Piper’s and Nell’s. Whoever had orchestrated the one-two-punch attack on the MacPherson sisters today had planned it too carefully to make a careless mistake. According to the young officer on the landing, the second part of the punch had come within a hairbreadth of being successful. The bastard would have run Piper down on the street if not for Nell’s quick thinking and amazing reflexes.

Reid shifted his gaze to where she stood arranging mugs on a tray and once more absorbed the overload to his senses. He was almost getting used to her effect on him.

Almost.

He certainly hadn’t been prepared when she’d opened the door of the apartment. That first sight of her had hit him in the gut with the power a double-barreled shotgun. The sexual pull had been even more potent and primitive than he’d recalled. Seven years ago, he could blame it on hormones, but he found it harder to rationalize it now and impossible to deny.

Thinking back, he recalled that he’d sensed her the instant she’d opened the door—a tingling awareness along all of his nerve endings. And he’d caught her scent—something he couldn’t quite describe. When he had turned away from the young officer and looked into her eyes, his mind had gone clear as glass, and all he’d seen was her.

All of her.

He was trained to take in numerous details in one glance, but they’d never registered so clearly on his senses before that he’d lost track of his surroundings. In that freeze-framed instant in time, he was completely absorbed in taking her in. The golden-blond hair that was clipped back from her face fell below her shoulders. The jacket and pants in some clingy fabric revealed a neat athletic body with more curves and longer legs than he remembered. Even as he registered all of that, his gaze hadn’t wavered from her face. He couldn’t look away from those eyes. They were still that dark, deep blue—the color of Eleanor’s sapphires—and every bit as fascinating. Then there was the pale-as-milk skin, the soft unpainted mouth, the lips that were slightly parted. In surprise? Anticipation?

Nell? There was a question in the word he’d spoken, but he still wasn’t sure what he’d been asking. What he knew was that for an instant he’d been tempted to step forward and take a taste of that mouth. It was fear that had kept him from moving. Fear that he might not be able to stop with a kiss.

No woman had ever made him afraid before.

Then Piper had come to the door, and he’d remembered who he was, where he was, and that this was Nell.

His stepsister.

He wished he could think of her only that way—the tiny and fragile girl who had to be cared for and protected. But the girl he’d carried around in his memory was turning out to be a sharp right turn from the woman who’d rescued her sister with a flying tackle. As a man who had fine-tuned his abilities to anticipate the future, Reid normally didn’t like surprises. But in Nell’s case, there was a part of him that was looking forward to them.

As long as they didn’t distract him from the job he had to do. The MacPherson sisters were currently the priority he had to focus on.

He shifted his gaze back to the table where Piper was frowning down at her cell phone, examining the photos she’d taken of the three letters as if she had missed something. But she hadn’t missed anything. The message was clear. Someone, and he was betting it was Deanna Lewis’s partner, wanted Eleanor’s sapphires badly enough to kill off the remaining members of the MacPherson family to get them. The would-be killer’s focus seemed to be on the sisters for now, but the threats extended to their father, his mother, their aunt Vi. And because of their relationship with Adair and Piper, Cam and Duncan could also be on the list.

“Send me something as soon as you have it,” Duncan said, then ended his call. “Nelson says that the car was just reported stolen from a hotel parking garage. But two of the eyewitnesses have arrived at the precinct. They’re going to work with a sketch artist. If all goes well, they’ll have something to put on the early-evening news.”

“The sketch probably won’t help us much,” Nell said as she served tea to Piper and Duncan. “Both witnesses said the driver was wearing a hat low on his forehead, a beard and sunglasses. Those are pretty standard items for a disguise. In fact, he could even be a she.”

Reid exchanged a glance with his brother. He was impressed with her analysis. And her focus. It was stronger than his was.

Piper frowned at her cell. “You should have told us the second you received the first letter.”

Nell moved forward and rested a hand on Piper’s shoulder. “I should have acted faster after I received the first letter. I won’t make that mistake again. Whoever is behind the notes planned everything very carefully, and I must have been under surveillance. In Louisville, the letter was delivered to my work. To do that here in D.C., the job was trickier. The manager of Pages told me the sign’s been in the window for almost a month, so the author of the letter knew exactly when I’d be there to sign for it. Arranging for the instant delivery was a piece of cake. But he had only a few hours to verify that Piper was with me and that we’d eventually have to cross the street to get to the apartment. It was a good bet that we’d stop for lunch or coffee at the café. We’ve done that every day since I arrived. All he had to do was wait.”