Victoria blinked as she watched Rocket circle the table to investigate the other models on the shelves. He possessed such bedrock masculinity that she would have thought he’d find her dollhouses too sissy for his consideration—or at least dismiss them with no more than a cursory glance. Instead he seemed fascinated. When he came to the stone castle and glanced over his shoulder at her, his dark eyes all but shot sparks of pure, engaged interest.
“This one’s different. It’s more like a guy’s dollhouse.”
A laugh escaped her. “Good call. I made it for a boy with an extensive collection of metal toy soldiers, most of which are knights, kings, horses and other assorted medieval warriors. It was my first experience with masonry and I’m pretty proud of the way it turned out.” Coming around the worktable to stand next to him, she hauled the castle off the shelf and placed it on the table. “Look.” She reached across his arm and past the turrets into the castle’s open top. “It has a working drawbridge and portcullis and if you move this stone just so—” she demonstrated with a fingertip “—and then the one next to it like this—shazam!” The interior wall swivelled to expose a secret room that had walls bristling with sketches of medieval weaponry.
John laughed. “Excellent! I would have beefed up the back wall here for a better defense, but it looks as if you’ve got the firepower and that’s half the battle. A couple vats of boiling oil, enough supplies to hold off a siege and you’ve got yourself a good chance of holding the fort.” He turned his head to look at her. “Do you make these for a living?”
“Yes.” Finding his face suddenly much too close, his enthusiastic curiosity much too compelling, Victoria eased back a step, trying to ignore the smooth, hot-skinned drag of his inner forearm against her own. “I sort of fell into it by default. I made one for Es and a couple of her friends fell in love with it and wanted one for themselves. Their respective parents commissioned me to make them and from there word of mouth just started to build. It was confined mostly to the Mayfair area of London until last year, when I set up a Web page on the net. Now I’ve got all the work I can handle. More, really. I’ve had to turn commissions away.”
“Have you ever considered mass producing?”
“For about five minutes.” She met his gaze. “But then I rejected the idea. Not only would mass production put me right back in the very situation I was trying to avoid when I left Kimball and Jones—devoting more time to my business than to Esme—it would strip all the individuality out of the process…and probably most of the fun, as well. I need to keep it small. That way I can build each house to suit the little girl—or in the castle’s case, boy—for whom it’s meant. Each child gets a quality, almost-one-of-a-kind dollhouse and I get a creative outlet…not to mention steady employment that’s fairly lucrative for being so selective.” Much too aware of his shoulder bumping up against hers as he leaned down to test the castle’s various working parts, she moved away, going to the shelves and finding make-work straightening the remaining models. “Which reminds me, I should get back to it. You said you had a reason for coming up here?”
When she turned back, she found him checking out her legs once again, but he immediately pulled his gaze up to meet hers. “Yeah. The probability that Jared left town just got a lot stronger. I tracked down the cab driver who picked him up the night your father was murdered.”
“Oh, God.” Feeling her legs go weak, Victoria reached for the stool she used when working at the table and pulled it beneath her hips. “What did he say? Where did he take him?”
“He said the kid was extremely quiet and seemed stunned. Maybe in shock. That when he asked if he was all right, Jared laughed hysterically, but calmed down enough to insist on being taken to the bus station.”
“Did you find out where he went from there?”
“No. I couldn’t find anyone at the station who remembers selling him a ticket. But most teens on the run head for a city and since Denver’s the nearest one to Colorado Springs, odds are better than even that’s where your brother went.”
She pushed to her feet. “I can be ready to leave in ten minutes.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, there. Slow down.” He grabbed hold of her shoulders and leveled a no-nonsense, let’s not-get-ahead-of-ourselves look on her. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“But if that’s where you think he is…”
“Think being the operative word here. Running around like a couple of chickens with their heads cut off won’t gain us anything. We do this the smart way, which means I tap into my resources. First and foremost among those is Stand Up For Kids in Denver.”
“What’s that?”
“An organization that gives aid to runaways and street kids. I’ll give them a call and fax them Jared’s photograph so they can be on the lookout for him when they do their outreach in Skyline Park Sundays and Tuesdays. Kids learn quickly where they can score a free meal and some toiletries, so if Jared’s in Denver, he’ll likely show up at Skyline sooner or later. I’ve worked with this organization before and they know they can trust me not to return a kid to an abusive situation. And in return, I can trust the Stand Up counselors to give me a call as soon as they spot him.”
“Then we go to Denver?”
“Then I do, anyway.”
“If you think I’m sending you off to collect him all by yourself, John, think again. Jared’s bound to be scared to death, and he doesn’t know you from Adam.”
He gave her shoulders a tiny squeeze. “What do you say we wait until we actually have a useable lead before we argue this to a standstill?”
The commonsense suggestion made her realize the silliness of standing here arguing about it now and she couldn’t help but smile. She gave him a poke. “Deal.”
Surprisingly, instead of treating her overture as the tension breaker she’d intended and returning a smile of his own, John frowned. “Dammit, Tori, I wish you hadn’t done that,” he growled. “Now I’ve got no choice but to get an answer to the question that’s been driving me nuts ever since I landed on your doorstep.”
“What question is tha—?” The query hadn’t fully left her mouth before she was caught against his long, hard body. One strong arm slipped down to wrap around her waist and his free hand tunneled beneath her hair to grasp the back of her neck.
She stared up at him in surprised disbelief as his body heat began to permeate every inch of her he touched. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Miglio—?”
John’s mouth, firm, hot and confident, covered hers, cutting off her demand.
For a moment, sheer astonishment held her immobile. Then she absorbed the taste of him, felt the slide of his tongue and with her heart thundering in the outraged fear that she’d never be able to hold herself aloof from this man, she slapped her hands against the solid wall of his chest and gave it a firm shove.
He didn’t even budge and she suddenly recalled his strength, remembered the way it used to intrigue her, titillate her. She remembered, too, the way it had once fulfilled the until-then-unacknowledged little girl inside of her who’d always longed for someone to stand between her and the world. Somebody to keep her safe.
Well, she’d buried that child the day she’d learned to accept once and for all that the only person she could depend on protecting her was herself. And assembling all