Baffled, Jenny shook her head. “No.”
“Has she ever thought about becoming a nun?” Linc asked. “Taken the first steps?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Linc lunged from his chair with such force that he knocked it over backward. Still shell-shocked by his outlandish presumption, the Hendrens sat mutely and watched him storm from the kitchen and race for the stairs. He took them two at a time. If the door of the guest bedroom hadn’t been made of top-grade lumber, it would have shattered beneath his hand as he shoved it open. It crashed against the inside wall. He marched in.
The bed was neatly made. The room was empty. The only movement came from the open window overlooking the patio and pool below. Airy curtains fluttered there in the soft, Southern, morning breeze.
Linc spun around and hastily retraced his footsteps to the kitchen. Civilities were the furthest thing from his mind. “You didn’t tell me she was already up,” he accused his hosts.
Jenny was staring at him apprehensively and fiddling with a button on her maternity blouse. Cage was nonchalantly sipping coffee. It was he who looked up and said innocently, “You didn’t ask.”
“Where is she?”
“She went horseback riding,” Cage told him evenly. “Got up early, even before Jenny.”
Linc was holding back his explosive Irish temper with remarkable self-control. The only dead giveaways were the muscles flexing his jaw and his hands, which were held rigidly at his sides while his fingers alternately opened and closed into fists.
“We drank a cup of coffee together, then she asked if she could borrow one of the horses for a while. I helped her saddle it, and she rode off in that direction.” Cage hitched his chin toward the endless horizon.
Linc looked in the direction Cage had indicated and studied the prairie through the kitchen window. “How long ago?”
Cage, secretly enjoying Linc’s stewing, contemplated his answer to the simple question for an inordinate length of time. “Oh, about an hour and a half, I’d say.”
“Can I borrow your pickup?” Linc had noticed a pickup in the garage the evening before. Unlike Cage’s other cars, which were polished to a high sheen, the pickup had been scarred by every single mile recorded on its odometer.
“Sure,” Cage replied congenially and stood up to fish the keys out of his tight jeans pocket. He tossed them to Linc.
“Thanks.” He turned abruptly and left through the back door, covering the distance between the house and the garage with the long, angry stride of a man bent on getting swift and savage revenge.
Jenny got up and moved to the window. She watched Linc slam shut the door of the pickup and grind the reluctant motor to a start. He cranked the steering wheel around and drove off in a cloud of dust.
“Cage, I don’t think you should have given him the keys. He looks positively furious.”
“If Kerry led him to believe that she’s a nun, I’m sure he is. And I can’t say that I blame him.”
“But—”
“Jenny,” he said soothingly, moving behind her and encircling her with his arms. He linked his hands together beneath her heavy breasts. “Remember the night I chased down that Greyhound bus you were on?”
“How could I forget that? I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.”
Smiling at the memory, he placed his mouth close to her ear. “Well, I was just as upset then as Linc is now. Hell or high water couldn’t have kept me from coming after you. We couldn’t have stopped Linc either. If I hadn’t lent him my truck, I think he would have struck out on foot to get to Kerry.” He kissed her neck. “I just hope that his wild-goose chase meets with as much success as mine did.?
?
Linc, pushing the old truck to perform in excess of its capabilities, had murder on his mind, not romance. He scorched the roof of the pickup with curses and disparagements aimed at Kerry’s character. When he had exhausted those, he started verbally lambasting his own culpability.
What a damn fool he’d been! She must have been laughing up her sleeve at him all this time. She had duped him not once, but twice. First impersonating a whore, then a nun. Two such diverse personifications, and he’d been gullible enough to believe both of them.
What the hell was wrong with him? Had he been plagued with a jungle disease that ate at his brain? Had Kerry Bishop been slipping a mind-altering drug into his water canteen? How could he, Linc O’Neal, have been so goddamn naive?
He’d been around. He wasn’t a lust-blind kid, unacquainted with the wiles of females. Why hadn’t he seen past Kerry Bishop’s beautiful face and into her devious mind? She wasn’t a self-sacrificing churchwoman, but a cunning tease, who evidently had no scruples against manipulating a man to get what she wanted out of him.
Even when she had succeeded in achieving her goal, she had kept up the pretense. “For her own protection,” he said through gritted teeth. “To save her sweet neck,” he told the dashboard of the truck.
A luscious figure and a gorgeous face had cost him his common sense and quick-wittedness. He hadn’t been his cold, calculating, cautious self since he’d left that damn cantina with Wooten Bishop’s deceitful daughter.