“You were twenty years old.”

“We all have to grow up sometime.”

“I was afraid Quentin would have you killed, too.”

She faltered, a little of the color going out of her face. “You were protecting me,” she said, flattening her legs again, practically kicking him off the bed. “We could have figured something out. Talked to the police. Hired bodyguards. Something.”

“There was no proof. No trail, Rebecca. Nothing-”

“I was the good guy with a gun that night in Saigon. I managed to shoot that Vietnamese assassin and kept him from killing Mai while you were writhing on the floor with two bullets in the shoulder.”

Rebecca, he recalled, had never been one for false modesty or sulking. “Yeah, and you and Mai still would have been killed if it hadn’t been for the Frenchman.”

“Only because I ran out of bullets-and my aim was off because I was worried about you.”

“You know what they say, sweetheart-close don’t count but in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

She wasn’t impressed. “I’m the oldest of six kids. My father was killed by Vietcong guerrillas when I was eight. My grandfather’s an outcast. I grew up in a part of Florida that isn’t all beaches and air-conditioning and Disney World. We had poisonous snakes, mosquitoes, lizards, giant cockroaches, spiders, the occasional alligator. I dealt with all of that, Jared.” She crossed her arms under her breasts and gave him a scathing Boston Brahmin look that she could have patented. “You could have told me about Quentin.”

“And how could I have justified it? ‘Oh, R.J.’s had so much thrown at her in her life, what’s a little more.’”

She scoffed. “Letting me believe you and Tam had had an affair wasn’t exactly sparing me.”

“What about the fortune in jewels you neglected to mention?”

“That’s different.”

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Sitting back, he searched her eyes, and the past fourteen years melted away. “The minute you hit Saigon you knew I was in love with you. If you’d really loved me, you could have forgiven me a fling with Tam.”

He could see her swallow, but she wasn’t one to back down. “And then what? Gerard would have shown up on our doorstep, and you’d have said, ‘Oh, well, I neglected to tell you this back in 1975, but Tam and I never slept together.’”

“Think we’d have lasted fourteen years?”

Her jaw set hard. “You shouldn’t have lied to me.”

“I didn’t. You asked me if my name as Mai’s father was a mistake, and I said no.”

“The intent,” she pointed out, “was deception, and that’s the same as a lie.”

“The intent,” he said, rolling onto his knees and moving in on her, “was to spare you from having to suffer for choices you didn’t make. The intent, I’ll have you know, was to keep the twenty-year-old woman I loved from getting killed because of something I’d seen and done.” He put a hand on the headboard at either side of her, trapping her between his arms. “There’s a nobility of purpose in what I did that you fail to see.”

“You made a choice for me that wasn’t yours to make.”

His face was so close to hers he could feel her breath and the fire of her eyes. “Okay. What would you have done if I came to you in Florida after I got out of the hospital and laid everything on for you?”

She thought a moment. “You wouldn’t have gotten the chance. I’d told Papa O’Keefe and my five brothers what a heel you were, and we had the shotguns loaded, the driveway booby-trapped, the sheriff on alert-”

Jared was laughing, amazed at how good it felt. “I loved you, R.J.” And he suddenly grew serious, taking in the sight, smell, closeness of her, and he whispered, “God help me, but I still do.”

The memories that had been haunting Rebecca for hours receded, and there was only the present. For a change, it was all she wanted. Jared shut the door and she switched off the light. In the darkness, she listened to the wind and the sound of a siren in the distance, heard the bed creak when Jared sat back down, his bare feet on Eliza’s old Persian carpet. She was stretched out on her side so that his hip pressed against her thighs.

“We’ll figure out this business with Quentin and Gerard and the Jupiter Stones,” he said softly. “We’ll figure us out.”

She put a cool hand on his arm. “I know we will.”

Turning toward her, he rubbed the outer curve of her hip through the soft, silky fabric of her nightgown. She saw that his arms and chest were still well-muscled. There was a no-nonsense toughness to Jared Sloan often belied by his nonchalance and teasing nature. He was willing to make difficult choices; he had made them.

His hand slid over her hip to her waist, stopping just under her breast. “I don’t want to rush you into anything.”

She smiled and rolled onto her back, so that his hand fell onto the flat of her abdomen. “Rush me.”

It was all he needed to hear.

He peeled off his jeans, and when he turned around, she was sitting up with her back to him, holding her hair up on top of her head. “I’ll go nuts trying to get these buttons,” she said. “Would you mind?”

There seemed to be fifty thousand of the tiny, pearl-like buttons.

“I’m liking this nightgown less and less,” he muttered. “It looks like something Queen Victoria would wear.”

“She might have, for all I know. I never really thought of buttons as a deterrent, but you only have to unfasten about ten of them. Then I can just pull it over my head.”

“Can’t I just tear it off?”

She glanced around at him with one of her scrimy Blackburn looks.

He undid the buttons. They were small and many and the job was pure torture, but the reward-

She gave him the honor of lifting the nightgown over her head and tossing it onto the floor. His breath caught at the creaminess of her skin, the softness of her breasts with their pink-pebble tips. How the hell had he gone on without her?

“R.J…”

“I know.” Her voice was hoarse, and she brushed one finger along the edge of his sandpapery jaw. “It’s been forever.”

The curtains at her windows billowed in a breeze that cooled her overheated skin and made her shiver, until Jared came to her and they fell back together onto the narrow bed. She felt hot and light-headed and very aroused. She could sense his hunger in their kiss, in the searing wetness of his tongue. And with the taste of him, the heat of his body against hers, she knew she’d been wrong; it hadn’t been forever.

It had, it seemed, just been yesterday.

He smoothed his hands down her sides, all the way to the middle of her thighs and back again, sliding them over her breasts, murmuring how beautiful she was, how much he wanted her. They kissed again, slowly, deliciously. He moved his hips against her. Rocked, swayed. Every movement was titillating and sexy.

She raked her fingers through his hair and pushed his head back so that she could see his eyes and he could see hers. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Good.”

His voice was ragged, his eyes were dusky, and she knew he was perilously close to the edge himself. In the next instant, he thrust into her, and she pulled him in deep, crying out as they fell together.

It was a long, sweet, frantic fall.

Just before dawn, Jared eased out of bed and left Rebecca twisted in the covers, sleeping. And by the time he got downstairs, the cuckoo was counting out five o’clock.

He still didn’t sleep, but it was just as well. By five-thirty Rebecca was sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the couch, Sweatshirt curled up placidly in her lap. Jared watched jealously.

“I’ve got a new theory,” Rebecca announced.

“Go ahead-shoot.”

“Gerard never knew Tam had the Jupiter Stones the night she was killed. He wasn’t there because of them, he was there because of Quentin. He knew what Quentin was up to, tried to stop it, and at the same time figured it was something he could use as leverage with Annette.”