Mountain Shelter. Cassie Miles

couldn’t imagine him any other way.

      * * *

      DYLAN HADN’T COME here looking for work. His intention had been a simple response to Brian’s call, helping out a friend with a crazy lady for a neighbor. But he was happy with the way things had turned out; spending time with this particular lady promised to be a challenge and a pleasure.

      With that extra-large bathrobe swaddled around her, he couldn’t tell much about Jayne’s body. But he liked the bits he saw: her slender throat, her delicate hands and her neat ankles. Drooling over her ankles probably qualified him for the Pervert Hall of Fame, so he transferred his gaze to her long, thick, rich brown hair. A few strands escaped the ponytail and fell gracefully across her cheek. Never before had the word “tendril” seemed appropriate.

      He didn’t even pretend to look away. It was his duty to watch her body. He murmured, “I love my job.”

      “Excuse me?”

      “I’ll enjoy getting to know you.”

      Her full lips curled in a wise smile as she accepted the compliment. He’d always believed that smart women were sexier, maybe because of their intensity or creativity or strength.

      Then she licked her lips.

      He swallowed hard.

      “Also,” he said, “your break-in is the tip of the iceberg for a very cool puzzle. Your security alarm system is one of the best on the market. Disarming it took technical finesse that’s above the talents of the average burglar. Not that I think the intent of your intruders was robbery. After they entered the house, they went directly to your bedroom.”

      “How do you know that?”

      “While you were writing out the list of things you need, I read your account.” He gestured to the two single-spaced sheets of paper that lay behind her on the desk.

      “How could you read it? The paper is upside-down to you.”

      “It’s a skill.” He shrugged. “Do you think they wanted to rob you? Do you have some hidden treasure in your house?”

      “I don’t keep anything of value at the house.”

      Why did they break in? Since there were two of them, it didn’t seem likely that they were stalkers or that the break-in was for sex. Not his problem. As a bodyguard, he wasn’t expected to solve the crime. “Are you ready to talk to the police?”

      She held her hand level in front of her eyes. “There’s only a slight residual tremor.”

      “Not enough to register on the Richter scale. Let’s move.”

      Keeping a hold on Cocoa’s collar, Dylan guided her from Brian’s home office to the kitchen, where a plainclothes cop sat at the table with Brian. Dylan handed over the dog to his owner and introduced Detective Ray Cisneros, a weary-looking man with heavy-lidded eyes and a neat mustache.

      After Jayne shook his hand and gave him her typed statement, she approached the uniformed lady cop. Her name, as it said on her brass nameplate, was E. Smith. Dylan had met her when he first came in.

      “I need to apologize,” Jayne said. “I’m sorry for the way I behaved earlier. I was rude.”

      E. Smith darted a suspicious glance to the left and the right as though looking for somebody or something to jump out at her and yell boo. “Um, that’s okay.”

      “Thanks for accepting my apology.” As Jayne turned away from the cop, her moccasins tangled in the overlong hem of the robe and she stumbled. Quickly recovering, she went toward Brian. “I want to thank you for being a great neighbor. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, just ask.”

      Dylan didn’t know what she’d done to make everybody mad, but he respected her for facing up to her mistakes. And she wasn’t just offering phony pleas for forgiveness. Her pretty blue eyes shone with sincerity.

      When she returned to the kitchen table with a glass of water, DPD Detective Cisneros looked up from the typed statement and smoothed the edges of his mustache. “You work at Roosevelt Hospital, correct?”

      “Yes.”

      “And you’re a neurosurgeon. A resident?”

      “I completed my residency last year.”

      “Is that so?”

      Dylan heard the disbelieving tone in the detective’s voice and didn’t blame him for being skeptical. She looked too young for such an important occupation. In the droopy bathrobe with her hair in a ponytail, she’d have a hard time passing for eighteen.

      “It is, in fact, so.” She took a deep breath and recited her accomplishments by rote. “I completed college at age sixteen, med school at nineteen, internship at twenty and fulfilled the requirements of an eight-year residence in neurosurgery last year. Twice, I’ve won the Top Gun Award from the YNC, Young Neurosurgeons Committee.”

      If his theory that smart women were sexier was correct, Dylan had hit the jackpot with Jayne. She was a genuine, kick-ass genius.

      Cisneros took a minirecorder from the inner pocket of his brown leather jacket, verified with Jayne that it was okay to record her and launched into the standard questions.

      “Do you have any enemies? Anyone who would wish you harm?”

      “There’s professional jealousy. Some of my colleagues wouldn’t mind if I vanished off the face of the earth, but none of them are likely to hire thugs with stun guns and stage a break-in. Likewise with patients and the families of patients.”

      “What about in your personal life? Do you have a boyfriend?”

      “Not at the moment,” she said.

      Dylan stifled a cheer.

      “Any bad breakups?” Cisneros asked. “Is there anyone who won’t take no for an answer? Or women who think you stole their boyfriends?”

      “My personal life is super dull.”

      “In your statement,” he said, referring to her typewritten account, “you quote the intruder as saying he doesn’t want to hurt you. Did you believe him?”

      “He had a stun gun,” she pointed out.

      “But he didn’t use it.”

      Cisneros asked half-a-dozen more questions that circled the main issue, trying to get a handle on why the intruders had staged this break-in. They had to be after something.

      Jayne’s responses weren’t real helpful. Not that she was being difficult. She just didn’t know why men wearing ski masks had attacked her.

      Cisneros glanced down at the account she’d written with such care. Very deliberately, he set those pages aside. His unspoken message was clear. “Maybe they don’t want to hurt you, Jayne.”

      “No?”

      “Tell me about your father.”

      “Please don’t call him,” she said quickly. “He doesn’t need to know about this.”

      Dylan heard fear in her voice.

      Cisneros picked up on it, too. “Are you afraid to tell him?”

      “It’s not that.” Frown lines bracketed her mouth. “It’s just... I haven’t spoken to him on the phone for a couple of months, haven’t seen him since the Christmas before last.”

      “Is he local?”

      “Dallas, he lives in Dallas.”

      Dylan watched as the cool, sexy, smart woman transformed into a little girl with messy hair. She gazed down at her hands, pretending great interest as her slender fingers twisted into a knot on her lap. Her feet in their scuffed moccasins turned pigeon-toed.

      Her father, Peter Shackleford, was rich enough to have an airport named