Paper Rose. Diana Palmer

      “You’ll tempt me once too often,” he bit off. “This teasing is more dangerous than you realize.”

      She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She was throbbing, aroused, sick with desire. In all her life, there had been only this man who made her feel alive, who made her feel passion. Despite the traumatic experience of her teens, she had a fierce physical attraction to Tate that she was incapable of feeling with any other man.

      She touched his lean cheek with cold fingertips, slid them back, around his neck into the thick mane of long hair that he kept tightly bound—like his own passions.

      “You could kiss me,” she whispered unsteadily, “just to see how it feels.”

      He tensed. His mouth poised just above her parted lips. The silence in the car was pregnant, tense, alive with possibilities and anticipation. He looked into her wide, pale, eager green eyes and saw the heat she couldn’t disguise. His own body felt the pressure and warmth of hers and began to swell, against his will.

      “Tate,” she breathed, pushing upward, toward his mouth, his chiseled, beautiful mouth that promised heaven, promised satisfaction, promised paradise.

      His dark fingers corded in her hair. They hurt, and she didn’t care. Her whole body ached.

      “Cecily, you little fool,” he ground out.

      Her lips parted even more. He was weak. This once, he was weak. She could tempt him. It could happen. She could feel his mouth, taste it, breathe it. She felt him waver. She felt the sharp explosion of his breath against her lips as he let his control slip. His mouth parted and his head bent. She wanted it. Oh, God, she wanted it, wanted it, wanted it….

      

      The sudden blare of a horn made her jump, brought her back to the painful present in the chill of the nation’s capitol, outside the exclusive restaurant where she’d just made the evening news by attacking Tate Winthrop with a tureen of crab bisque.

      She stretched, hurting as she let the memory of the past reluctantly slip away. A car horn had separated her from Tate two years ago, too. He’d withdrawn from her at once, and that had been the end of her dreams. She’d helped solve his murder mystery, which was no more than a Paleo-Indian skull with a bullet in it, used in an attempt to frame an unpopular member of congress. Any anthropologist worth her salt would have known the race from the dentition and the approximate age from the patination and the projectile points and pottery that the would-be framer hadn’t realized would help date the remains.

      Tate had involved Cecily, a student, and that had given her hope. But fate had quickly taken hope away with a blare from an impatient driver’s horn. From that moment on, Tate had put her at a distance and kept her there, for the two years of her master’s studies in forensic archaeology. Their close friendship had all but vanished. And tonight had shattered her world.

      Her doctorate was a fading dream already. Since Tate had rescued her from her abusive stepfather at the age of seventeen and taken her to live with his mother on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux reservation, which was near the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, he’d acted in stead of a guardian. But he’d told her that she had a grant to pay for her education, her apartment, her clothing and food and other necessities. She had a bank account that it paid into. All her expenses had been covered for the past six years by that anonymous foundation that helped penniless young women get an education. At least that’s what Tate had told her. And tonight she’d discovered that it had all been a lie. Tate had been paying for it, all of it, out of his own pocket.

      She pulled the shawl closer as a tall, lithe figure cut across the parking lot and joined her at the passenger door.

      “You’re already famous,” Colby Lane told her, his dark eyes twinkling in his lean, scarred face. “You’ll see yourself on the evening news, if you live long enough to watch it.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Tate’s on his way right now.”

      “Unlock this thing and get me out of here!” she squeaked.

      He chuckled. “Coward.”

      He unlocked the door and let her climb in. By the time he got behind the wheel and took off, Tate was striding across the parking lot with blood in his eye.

      Cecily blew him a kiss as Colby gunned the engine down the busy street.

      “You’re living dangerously tonight,” Colby told her. “He knows where you live,” he added.

      “He should. He paid for the apartment,” she added in a sharp, hurt tone. She wrapped her arms closer around her. “I don’t want to go home, Colby. Can I stay with you tonight?”

      She knew, as few other people did, that Colby Lane was still passionately in love with his ex-wife, Maureen. He had nothing to do with other women even two years after his divorce was final. He drank to excess from time to time, but he wasn’t dangerous. Cecily trusted no one more. He’d been a good friend to her, as well as to Tate, over the years.

      “He won’t like it,” he said.

      She let out a long breath. “What does it matter now?” she asked wearily. “I’ve burned my bridges.”

      “I don’t know why that socialite Audrey had to tell you,” he muttered irritably. “It was none of her business.”

      “Maybe she wants a big diamond engagement ring, and Tate can’t afford it because he’s keeping me,” she said bitterly.

      He glanced at her rigid profile. “He won’t marry her.”

      She made a sound deep in her throat. “Why not? She’s got everything…money, power, position and beauty—and a degree from Vassar.”

      “In psychology,” Colby mused.

      “She’s been going around with Tate for several months.”

      “He goes around with a lot of women. He won’t marry any of them.”

      “Well, he certainly won’t marry me,” she assured him. “I’m white.”

      “More a nice, soft tan,” he told her. “You can marry me. I’ll take care of you.”

      She made a face at him. “You’d call me Maureen in your sleep and I’d lay your head open with the lamp. It would never work.”

      He drew in a long breath. His lean hands tightened on the wheel. One of them was artificial. Colby had lost an arm in Africa. He was a mercenary, a professional soldier. Sometimes he worked for various covert government agencies, sometimes he freelanced. She never asked about his frequent travels. They were companions who went out together occasionally, fellow sufferers of unrequited passions for other people. It made for a close friendship.

      “Tate’s a damned fool,” he said flatly.

      “I don’t appeal to him,” she corrected. “It’s a shame I’m not Lakota.”

      “Leta Winthrop would argue that point,” he murmured with an amused glance. “Didn’t you lobby for sovereignty at that Senate hearing last month?”

      “Me and several other activists. Some of the Lakota resent having a white woman plead their case, but I’ve been trying my best.”

      “I know.”

      “Thanks for your support.” She leaned back against the car seat. “It’s been a horrible night. I guess Senator Holden will never speak to me again, much less invite me to another political banquet.”

      “He’ll love the publicity he gets from your exit,” he corrected with a chuckle. “And I believe he’s been trying to persuade you to assume the position of assistant curator in charge of acquisitions with his new Native American Museum project in D.C.”

      “So he is. I may have to take it now. I can’t see going on with my studies under the circumstances.”

      “I’ve got some cash in Swiss banks. I’ll help you.”

      “Thanks,