Donovans 02 - Jade Island

road.
    “I’ll see what’s clean in my closet,” Kyle said.
    “Suit yourself. Literally.”
    He looked at her. She wasn’t as pale and tense as she had been at the hotel. In fact, she looked so calm that he wondered if he had been imagining her distress. Before he could talk himself into that cozy little reassurance, his gut let him know he was being a fool. Again.
    Whatever was going on, Lianne was in it right up to her sexy lips.
    Kyle turned the car into the driveway of one of Seattle’s more upscale and less ostentatious condo complexes. Thethree buildings were under twenty stories high, designed around the waterfront view, and owned by the real estate subsidiary of Donovan International.
    “Is this your place?” Lianne asked.
    “My family’s. Whoever is in town uses it.”
    “Nice.”
    “I prefer my cabin,” Kyle said, “but I’m here and it isn’t.”
    “Where is your cabin?”
    “In the San Juan Islands.”
    He pulled an electronic unit from a compartment in the driver’s door.
    “Is that a garage-door opener?” Lianne asked.
    “Sort of.”
    “It looks like a TV remote.”
    “That, too.”
    The handheld gadget Kyle used to get into the parking level had begun life as a suburban garage-door opener. Then he had started thinking about how useful it would be if it not only opened doors, but told him if anyone else had come looking for him while he was gone. The result was a soldering-gun marriage between a pager, a door opener, a TV remote, and a spiffy little computer chip that could store an organic chemistry textbook with room left over for the Oxford unabridged dictionary.
    Archer had christened the bastard electronic unit a “gizmo snitch” and promptly ordered one for himself. As long as they remembered to replace the batteries regularly, the snitch was reliable.
    The garage door unbolted automatically and lifted up long enough to allow Kyle’s hunter-green BMW to slide through. He looked at the display window of the snitch and saw a comforting line of zeros. Nobody in since he had left. No power interruptions. All doors in the condominium exactly as he had left them. Locked.
    “Is that some kind of fancy security system?” Lianne asked as he put the unit away.
    “Just a gadget I invented because I’m lazy.”
    She looked at him doubtfully. Nothing she had seen so far tonight—or in the past two weeks—had suggested that Kyle was lazy.
    “It’s true,” he said, smiling at her as he shut off the engine. “Unless it involves fishing, I don’t make a move I don’t have to.” Before she could ask any more questions, he changed the subject. “Ever been fishing?”
    “I went out on a ‘cattle boat’ once during the salmon season.”
    “Hell of a way to fish.”
    “I caught one,” Lianne said, eyes gleaming. “There’s a lot of power in them, even the little ones.”
    “How little was yours?”
    “Six pounds.”
    “That’s pretty little,” Kyle agreed.
    “It didn’t affect the flavor one bit,” she retorted. She licked her lips, remembering. “Succulent, like lobster. The color was so vivid.”
    Kyle slid out of the car. It was either that or take Lianne up on the unconscious invitation issued by her tongue. At least he thought it was unconscious.
    He leaned back into the car and looked at her intently. She wasn’t posed like a siren with her skirt halfway up to her crotch. Though her coat was open, she wasn’t fiddling with the jade beads that nuzzled against silk and taut nipples. If she was sending out sexual invitations, she was a hell of a lot more subtle about it than the women he was used to.
    And she smelled like heaven, after a whiff of the garage’s concrete-and-crankcase purgatory.
    “You’re welcome to come upstairs with me,” Kyle said. “If going to the condo makes you nervous, you’re welcome to wait down here. Your choice. Either way, I won’t be long.”
    Lianne met his eyes without coyness. “If you were going to be a jerk, you would have tried something when I ‘fainted’ or while we were playing hide-and-seek outside the hotel.”
    He smiled slightly. “I thought of it.”
    “Was that before or after you counted every vertebra in my spine?”
    Kyle’s laughter echoed in the parking garage. He thought again how much his smart-mouthed little sisters would enjoy Lianne. His older brothers would, too, but somehow that thought wasn’t nearly as appealing. All of his brothers were single and too damned good-looking.
    He went