The flare of auburn hair immediately seized his attention. He took a deep breath. Elle Kingston hesitated on the back porch. Dante noticed she held something clutched in her hands, but he couldn’t tell what itwas. Furtively she glanced first to the right and then to the left, looking guilty as sin.
Suspicious behavior.
What was she up to?
He narrowed his eyes, watching as she hunched her shoulders against the drizzle and scurried across the lawn. She paused at the edge of the forest, looked over her shoulder again and then quickly disappeared into the trees.
ELLE SLIPPED INTO the forest, the four cans of almost expired infant formula that she had boosted from the newborn nursery cradled in her arms. Fear pushed her heart rate higher. Anxiety had her biting her bottom lip.
Please, please, let the baby be okay, she prayed.
Worried that she might have been seen, Elle cast one more glance over her shoulder, looking back from where she’d come.
In the foggy drizzle, the five-story hospital built of stylized red stone looked positively gothic with its witch’s hat turrets, black slate roof and gingerbread trim. The guarded wrought-iron gates, privacy hedges and trellises twined with English ivy only added to the air of mystery.
Neighbors called it a fortress. Pleased patients dubbed it a sanctuary. Texas Monthly had christened Confidential Rejuvenations a place where celebrity secrets go to die.
At times like this, with gray weather enshrouding those stony walls, the place made Elle feel exquisitely sad at the thought of all those people with so much to hide.
The thing of it was, in spite of her occasionally mixed feelings about Confidential Rejuvenations and the work they did here, she loved her job. And she was concerned over the strange goings-on of the recent weeks. First there’d been the media leaks, then the arson in the laundry room. After that, several items had gone missing. Strange things like a ham from the kitchen, crutches from central supply, a crate of bleach from the janitor’s closet.
Taken one by one, the occurrences were nothing more than criminal mischief, but added together, it didn’t seem like a coincidence. Elle was beginning to wonder if someone was purposely trying to sabotage the hospital. The idea that someone was intentionally doing harm to the place she loved angered her.
She shook off her fanciful thoughts. There was no time for this. She had to make this quick. She had less than an hour left on her lunch break.
Resolutely she pushed deeper into thewoods. After several minutes of hiking, she passed the meditation sanctuary tucked away in a grotto of trees. The overgrowth of vines crawling across the walkway leading to the structure told her no groundskeepers had been up here to maintain it in a very long time. Patients seeking solitude rarely visited this sanctuary since they’d built a bigger one down by the river. More often it was used illicitly for romantic trysts by patients and hospital staff alike. Elle narrowed her eyes as she walked past, wondering if anyone was inside. But the windows were tinted, keeping passersby from peeking in.
The grounds of Confidential Rejuvenations encompassed over a hundred acres, most of it covered by the thick grove of indigenous trees that ran parallel to the river. Walking paths extended throughout the forest in several directions, but Elle diverged from the beaten trail.
Instead, she ducked under the branch of an aged oak and stepped over a moss-covered fallen log, keeping her eyes to the ground. Several minutes later, she saw what she was searching for—faint footprints in the mud.
Yes. It had to be near.
She crouched, studying the undergrowth, looking for any signs of the baby. Growing up with brothers and a father who hunted, Elle had learned through osmosis a tracking trick or two. She set down the bottles of formula and moved deeper into the undergrowth.
“Where are you little guy?” Elle cooed and pushed aside the thick carpeting of monkey grass slicked with fine beads of rain. “Come out, come out wherever you are. I might not be mama, but I’ve got food.”
Then she heard a twig crack loudly on the path she’d abandoned.
Startled, she rocked back on her heels, hand to her throat, pulse pounding, and jerked her head around. Peering through the newly budded leaves, she stared at the broad-shouldered man silhouetted in the tunnel of trees.
She recognized him immediately as he stood there looking very out of his element in his tailored silk suit. His intense, dark eyes drilled into her as if he could see deep down inside to all the things she tried so hard to hide—her fears, her insecurities, her doubts, the dark secrets she told no one, not even her best friends.
The little hop of sexual excitement catching low in her belly took Elle by surprise.
“Looking for something?” asked Dr. Dante Nash, his voice as cool as well water.
His presence threw her off balance and Elle hated being in a defensive position. She rose to her feet.
“You followed me,” she accused.
“I did,” he admitted without the slightest hint of apology in his voice.
“Why?”
Tree branches separated them. Dante on the path. Elle ankle-deep in the undergrowth, studying him like a cautious child peering from around her mother’s skirt. He made her feel things she didn’t want to feel—interest, attraction, compulsion and possibility.
He shrugged. “Curiosity.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you spying on me?”
His smile was slight and didn’t reach his light brown eyes. She found herself wondering when was the last time the man had genuinely smiled, and then Elle wondered why she was wondering.
“Why?” he asked. “Are you up to something that would invite spying?”
Oh, he was good, answering a question with a question, turning things around on her. His cagey manner made her bristle. Mark had been equally adept at evading her questions.
“No,” she denied, realizing just how defensive she sounded.
He glanced at the baby bottles she’d settled on the ground at her feet. “What’s that all about?”
She stepped in front of the baby bottles, blocking his view. Her gaze tracked over him, over the fine lines of his suit, growing damper every minute he stood in the drizzle. She was getting wet as well. She could feel her unruly hair growing frizzier by the second. “I really don’t think it’s any of your concern.”
“I don’t know about that,” Dante said. “Looks to me as if that baby formula came from the supply closet of Confidential Rejuvenations.”
“What if it did?”
“That’s theft in anyone’s book. Are you a thief, Elle Kingston?” His eyes locked with hers and he never looked away.
It was damned disconcerting. A buzz of sexual energy sizzled down her neck.
“What are you?” she snapped. “A cop?”
For a moment so brief she was sure she must have imagined it, a look of uneasiness passed over his face. He moved closer, pushing the soggy tree branches out of his way, and with each step toward her, Elle’s heart beat harder and her breath grew more shallow. He stopped within an arm’s length of her and she quelled the sudden urge to reach out to run her fingers over his strong, commanding jaw and fit the tip of her finger into the cleft at his chin.
“Mark’s been talking to me about buying into Confidential Rejuvenations,” he said. “It’s in my best interest to know if the hospital has a big problem with employee theft.”
“The formula expires in two days. It would be thrown out anyway.” She didn’t owe this man an explanation, so why was she giving him