Honor Bound(36)

"I lied to them. I told them I had met you on the road and given you a ride. I denied knowing that you were an escaped convict. I said that I had agreed to drive you to your grandfather's house because he was gravely ill and I felt sorry for you."

"They believed you?"

"I suppose so."

"You could have been implicated."

"But I wasn't."

"You could have had me charged with any number of crimes, Aislinn." The sound of her name startled both of them. They glanced at each other. Their eyes locked and held for a moment before falling away. "Why didn't you tell them the truth?"

"What would have been the point?" she asked, coming out of her chair and moving restlessly around the kitchen. "I was safe. You were going back to prison anyway."

"But you had been … hurt."

The euphemism fooled neither of them. They both realized that had she wanted to accuse him of rape she could have, and probably got him convicted of it. It would have been his word against hers, and who would have believed him?

"The scratch on my arm was superficial. Besides that wasn't your fault." Both knew that he hadn't been referring to the scratch, but it seemed prudent to pretend that he had been. "I think it was wrong of the prison officials not to let you go see your grandfather. In my eyes your escape was justified. No harm had been done. Not really."

"No one missed you?"

It cost her a great deal of pride to answer, but she told him the truth. "No." She had returned home as soon as the officials had released her. There hadn't been any media present in the canyon when Greywolf was arrested, so no one knew she had been involved.

"What about the people at your business?" he asked.

"What people?"

"You told me you would be missed."

"Of course I told you that."

"Oh," he said, shaking his head with chagrin, "there weren't any people."

"Not then. But I have two employees now."

He actually grinned. "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull a knife on you this time."

Aislinn smiled back, struck by how handsome he was. Now that the shock of seeing him had subsided, she was able to truly look at him for the first time. His hair was a trifle shorter in front, though it was still collar-length at the back. No prison pallor lightened his bronzed skin. Had she asked why, he could have told her that he ran every day around the prison yard, encircling it numerous times until he got in his quota of miles, which also accounted for his superb physical condition.

The silver earring still pierced his right lobe. The cross still rested in the soft black hair on his chest which she could see through the open collar of his shirt. His mother and Gene must have brought him new clothes for his release. His shirt and jeans looked new. Only the cowboy boots and the turquoise-studded belt around his trim waist were familiar to her.

"Well," he said, coming to his feet, "I promised you I wouldn't stay long. I just wanted to thank you for not making things rougher on me."

"You didn't have to bother."

"I started to write, but I wanted to thank you in person."

Lord, it would have been much easier on her nerves if he had mailed her a thank-you note! "I'm just glad you're out."

"I don't like being in anyone's debt, but—"

"You're not in my debt. I did what I thought was right, just as you did."

"Thanks all the same."

"You're welcome," she said, hoping that would end it. She led him through the living room and into the entrance hall.

Lucas had dreaded this meeting, not certain of how she was going to react to seeing him. The second she opened the door, she could have run screaming in terror and been justified in doing so.

He had been desperate the night he randomly chose her house to break into seeking food and shelter for a few hours. Desperate men did things they wouldn't ordinarily do. Like take a blameless Anglo woman hostage. It was still incomprehensible to him that she hadn't made him pay for that.

But now that he had accomplished his mission and thanked her, he was reluctant to leave. Odd. He had thought that once he had said what he had come to say, he would be more than ready to leave Aislinn Andrews for good and close that page of his life's history.

He hated to admit, even to himself, that he had thought about her while he was in prison. It had been months since that morning on the mountaintop, when she had given herself to him. He still found it hard to believe that it had really happened. Before his escape, his desire had been for a woman, period. Any and all.

But after his escape, his desire had had a face, a name, a tone of voice, a scent. And all of them belonged to Aislinn. Many nights, lying alone in his narrow prison bed, he had convinced himself that she wasn't real and that he had imagined the whole thing.

His body told him otherwise. Especially now, while his eyes were taking in the snug fit of her casual slacks over her bottom and thighs. She was shorter than he remembered, but maybe that was because she was barefoot. Her shirttail was out. It was an old shirt, a trifle too small for her. Oh, yes, while he had been sitting there sipping her soda, he had been thinking about sipping her breasts. He couldn't help but notice how amply they filled the front of the old shirt.

As she led him toward the front door, he was hypnotized by the swaying motion of her youthful ponytail. Was her hair as silky as he remembered? Had that rich blondness, such a flagrant trademark of her Anglo background, actually known his pillaging, Indian hands? And did her mouth, the one giving him a vapid, vacant smile now, remember the hard, searching strokes of his tongue inside it? He did.