Heart of Gold - By Tami Hoag Page 0,59

as if it were a beloved pet cat. A Mozart symphony played in the background.

“A very shrewd, intelligent man, Shane. Well brought up, you know. A Princeton man.” He smiled at Faith. “I myself graduated from Brown. A doctorate in behavioral psychology.”

Faith guessed she was supposed to be impressed, but she was too damn scared to pull it off. Tugging her cardigan closer around her, she merely stared at her captor with wide, unblinking eyes.

He was a handsome man in a cold, sharp-featured way. Thinning brown hair was combed straight back from his high forehead. The arch of his eyebrows above his narrow dark eyes could only be described as sinister looking. They went well with the cruel, thin line of his wide mouth. He was well dressed and meticulously groomed—right down to his neatly manicured nails. Somehow the fact that he was an educated, fastidious man made him seem even more diabolical in his madness.

In a little corner of her mind Faith noted that this entire scenario was insane. She was just a former business major from Notre Dame, a mother, a woman trying to pursue a quiet dream. How on earth had she ended up on a boat listening to Mozart while an assassin reminisced about his college days?

“What do you need me for?” She blurted the question out, amazed that she had dredged up the nerve.

Strauss’s face lit with amusement. “Why, bait, of course. You should be very familiar with the role by now, I should think.”

Faith’s skin crawled.

“This has all been a very amusing little game.” He took a sip of his cognac, savoring the amber liquid for a moment before continuing. “I managed to acquire a copy of Shane’s current case file, thanks to an obliging little secretary at the Justice Department. Pity I had to kill her. At any rate, I thought it rather a clever game to play the part of your tormentor. Rouse all of gallant Shane’s protective instincts and so on.”

A chill went through her at his calm dismissal of murder, and another shot through her at the thought that she had been used as bait to get to Shane. “You never had anything to do with DataTech or William?”

His lips curled upward as he shook his head.

Faith’s eyes strayed to the window. She would have given anything to feel Shane’s arms around her now. At the same time she had to hope she wouldn’t see him, because the man in the corner was planning to kill him, and she didn’t think she could survive watching that happen.

“Rest assured, Ms. Kincaid. He’ll arrive presently.”

Setting his brandy aside, Strauss rose from his chair only to settle beside Faith on the cushioned bench. She couldn’t suppress a shudder of revulsion as he coiled one arm around her shoulders.

“You see,” he said in his lazy voice, “I know Shane very well. His strengths, his weaknesses. His likes and dislikes. For a time we were nearly as close as brothers.” He brought his pistol up to caress the silencer against her temple almost lovingly, and his voice turned as cold as the steel of the gun. “Then he betrayed me.”

Bile rose in Faith’s throat as tears stung her eyes.

“Ah, but alas,” Strauss said, his voice heavy with mock regret as he glanced at his gold Rolex, “we have no time to discuss such things.” With his arm still around her, he stood and drew Faith along with him. “Our hero should be arriving any minute now. Let’s go out on the deck to greet him, shall we?”

Raw fury surged through Shane as he approached the Brutus, his gaze focused on Faith and the man who held a gun to her head. Close on fury’s heels was fear. He tried to will both emotions away. A clear head was essential in a situation as deadly as this one. Emotions got in the way; they clouded judgment and slowed the thinking process. But it was impossible for Shane to look at Adam Strauss—one arm around Faith’s shoulders and a pistol pressed to her temple—and not have a riot of feeling tear loose inside him.

His hand tightened on the grip of his gun as the dark desire to kill snaked through him. He may have been raised in an upper-class home. He may have been educated in one of the finest schools in the country. But primitive instinct easily cut through generations of civilized behavior. Beneath the cop, the scholar, the musician, he was a man, and Faith