Heart of Gold - By Tami Hoag Page 0,31

snarled and were generally unpleasant, but that wasn’t anything I hadn’t already experienced.”

“What else?” he prodded.

“Nothing, really.”

She was a terrible liar. Her teeth dug into her lower lip, and her gaze darted around the room, landing everywhere but on him. She was keeping something from him. Even if it hadn’t been written all over her lovely face, Shane could sense the tension in her.

Instead of wanting to shake the truth out of her, he found himself wanting to pull her into his arms and coax it out of her with gentle kisses. That was a bad idea, but he was darn near beyond caring about job ethics where Faith Kincaid was concerned. Just looking at her, even now when he was only at half strength, he wanted her. He was beginning to think they were simply going to have to deal with that desire sooner or later, because it obviously wasn’t going to go away.

At the moment, though, his first concern had to be finding out what had happened while he’d been dead to the world.

“Faith?”

She trembled as his smoky voice caressed her like velvet. His thumb gently rubbed circles at the paper-thin flesh on the inside of her wrist. She felt faint from trying to fight her own emotions. Darn him anyway, what did he want to know? That she had sat beside him during the worst of his fever trying to comfort and soothe him? That she had just fallen in love with him because he had stayed inside the lines when he colored Bedtime Bear? That she was so stressed out, all she wanted to do was find a quiet place, curl into a ball, and cry?

“Did you get another call?”

“No,” she said too quickly. “And Agent Matthews is handling everything, so you don’t have to worry—”

Shane cut her off with a virulent expletive. “The bastard called again. Get me my pants.”

Faith jerked her arm from his grasp and retreated two steps but faced him with a look of determination. “I will not get you your pants, Shane Callan. You are going to stay in bed at least another day.”

“The hell I am.”

Without warning or compunction he tossed back the covers and hauled himself to his feet, absolutely, magnificently naked.

Faith’s jaw dropped. He was everything she had imagined he would be and then some. Six feet, four inches of beautifully sculpted, elegantly built man. Someone should have bronzed him and put him on display in a museum. His powerful chest tapered to gracefully slim hips that led to muscular thighs and impressive evidence of his gender.

“Sweetheart,” he said in a voice like raw silk, “if you keep looking at me that way, neither one of us is going to need clothes in a minute.”

As impossible as it seemed, Faith was certain she blushed an even deeper shade of red. The heat in her cheeks rose another million degrees. Arrogant, presumptuous man! Never mind that her insides were melting like ice cream under a hot July sun, he needn’t have commented on it.

Quickly she turned and reached into the wardrobe. She yanked out one of the fresh bath towels she had stocked it with and thrust it at him.

“You are not leaving this room,” she announced, refusing to look at him another second for fear that she’d faint dead away. It seemed all her bones had turned to butter.

“I’m here to take care of you,” Shane pointed out, accepting the towel. “Not the other way around.”

“It seemed a moot point when you were unconscious.”

“I’m not unconscious anymore.”

“So I noticed,” Faith grumbled between her teeth, forcing her eyes to remain riveted to the pattern of the wallpaper.

“This is my case,” Shane said as he slung the swath of deep green terry cloth around his hips and secured it out of deference to Faith’s modesty. “I’m perfectly capable of handling it.”

“Yes, I seem to remember you mumbling something to that effect as Mr. Matthews and Mr. Fitz hauled your semiconscious body from the floor of my room.”

Shane ignored her sarcasm and abruptly went to the heart of the matter. “Was it the same caller? Did Matthews have time to trace it?”

“It was a letter, not a call,” Faith admitted in a low voice. Lust was instantly forgotten. She trembled as she thought of the note that had come in the morning mail. It seemed impossible for a scrap of paper to be such a terrifying thing, but it had shaken her almost as badly as the phone call had. She