he'd found out her - their, really - secret had to be infinitesimal. But looking at that big, no-nonsense hand, she couldn't shake the conviction that he had. And the idea that he knew their secret was bad. Terrible. Nothing short of disaster.
Her gaze skittered away from the tanned flesh branded by her rose, shifting downward to take in black jeans and a pair of black leather motorcycle boots. When she sucked in a shallow, panicky breath, she also sucked in the smell of that leather. Of him.
Funny, she thought woozily. She'd always associated the smell of leather with Dylan. But it had been the All-American, leather-and-wool scent of a letterman's jacket, not this new, dangerous scent of hot engines and animal skin.
"Damn you, Kitty Wilder," he said softly. Menacingly.
Oh, God. Yes. He knew the secret.
Kitty kept her gaze on his boots and tried with all her might to pretend this was just a dream. No, a nightmare. "C-can I help you?"
"Yeah." He paused, then leaned forward, one hand still on the table. With the other, he grasped her chin and forced her to look at him.
Kitty shivered as she stared into his face. His features were the same as she remembered - the sexy mouth, the almost dimpled chin - but so different too. His black hair was rock-and-roller wicked-looking, and his eyes weren't just dark brown, they were burning.
Swallowing hard, she had the distinct, unpleasant suspicion that even if she made it out of Hot Water five weeks from now, she wasn't going to entirely escape her past. Because it looked as if six feet two inches of it had just caught up with her.
He cemented that suspicion by tightening his grip on her chin. "Yeah, you can help me, Kitty Wilder," he said, his voice still prey-stalking quiet. "You can tell me when the hell we got married."
CHAPTER TWO
In Dylan Matthews's thirty-one years of experience, every debt ultimately exacted its price, and for some debts you kept on paying.
So he wasn't as surprised as one might expect to find himself secretly married to a woman with a face like a Sunday-school teacher, but who dressed like a harlot and worked in a whorehouse. But though he wasn't entirely surprised, he was furious.
He'd ridden all four hundred miles from L.A. to Hot Water with the angry words of an FBI assistant director still ringing in his ears, decibels louder than the whine of his Harley-Davidson Heritage motorcycle. The Bureau frowned on FBI agents - even FBI agents on involuntary leave due to unused stockpiles of overtime and vacation hours - who possessed secret wives.
Even if, until a week ago, the marriage had been a secret from the aforesaid FBI agent too.
But his anger had made his return to the rolling, oak-dotted hills of northern California easier. As he'd crossed the county line, a particularly large and nasty bug had flown into his mouth. Just when he'd expected to feel sharp stabs of guilt and remorse, he'd thought about his "wife" and crushed the bug between his back teeth.
He'd sworn to do the same to her.
Yet, rather than facing down some duplicitous, double-dealing doxy - he'd held onto his temper for half of the trip by coming up with alliterative insults - the woman on the other side of his ire hadn't changed that much. She was still Kitty.
Little Kitty Wilder.
Well, not so little anymore. Although she'd grown into those miles of legs she'd loped around on as a teenager, she hadn't been transformed into a vixenish villainess. She still had the Ivory-soap scrubbed look of a preacher's kid, with a wide brow, big blue eyes, and straight, blondish hair. The only jarring note to a face perfectly fashioned for the front row of Bible school was her small, plump-looking mouth.
His fingers tightened on her chin as he remembered staring at it eight years ago, fascinated by the paradox wrought by those puffy lips in their perpetual half pucker. For all Kitty's wide-eyed, innocent looks, the Wilder genes had bred true when it came to that cathouse mouth.
Dylan jerked his suddenly tingling fingers away from her skin and shoved his hands in his pockets, pissed at himself for even thinking Kitty and innocent in the same sentence. He narrowed his eyes and pinned her with a hot stare.
"Well?" he demanded. "Apparently we're married and we've been married for some time. Aren't you going to say anything?"
She swallowed. Then her lips parted and the tip of her tongue darted out