Never Trust A Lady

Kathleen Creighton Never Trust A Lady

© 1997

Dear Reader,

It’s summer. The days are long…hot…just right for romance. And we’ve got six great romances right here, just waiting for you to settle back and enjoy them. Linda Turner has long been one of your favorite authors. Now, in I’m Havireg Your Baby?! she begins a great new miniseries, THE LONE STAR SOCIAL CLUB. Seems you may rent an apartment in this building single, but you’ll be part of a couple before too long. It certainly works that way for Annie and Joe, anyway!

Actually, this is a really great month for miniseries. Ruth Wind continues THE LAST ROUNDUP with Her Ideal Man. all about a ranching single dad who’s not looking for love but somehow ends up with a pregnant bride. In the next installment of THE WEDDING RING, Marrying Jake, Beverly Bird matches a tough cop with a gentle rural woman-and four irresistible kids.

Then there’s multi-award-winning Kathleen Creighton’s newest, Never Trust a Lady. Who would have thought small-town mom Jane Carlysle would end up involved in high-level intrigue-and in love with one very sexy Interpol agent? Maura Seger’s back with Heaven in His Arms, about how one of life’s unluckiest moments-a car crash-somehow got turned into one of life’s best, and all because of the gorgeous guy driving the other car. Finally, welcome debut author Raina Lynn. In A Marriage To Fight For, she creates a wonderful second-chance story that will leave you hungry for more of this fine new writer’s work.

Enjoy them all, and come back next month for more terrific romance-fight here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

Leslie J. Wainger

Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

Prologue

Tom Hawkins hit the steering wheel with the heel of his hand as a silver Peugeot zipped around him on the right with barely inches to spare. “Idiot!” he snapped, adding his favorite filthy epithet in French.

The traffic on the Comiche President John F. Kennedy had come to a halt once more, to the symphonic accompaniment of blaring horns and shouted insults. Hawk glanced at his watch and swore again, softly and this time in English. No way around it, he was going to be late for his meeting with Loizeau.

He settled back with a resigned sigh and reached for his cigarettes, deliberately avoiding even a glance at the spectacular Mediterranean view on his left, where windsurfers’ sails swooped and darted like butterflies over molten copper breakers. It was just such scenes of almost searing beauty that made him hate this city so much. Marseilles reminded Hawk of New Orleans. It seemed to him that there was something false about both places… something sinister and treacherous lurking just beyond the raucous gaiety. The face of evil behind a Mardi Gras mask.

Death riding on a carousel, smiling and waving to the children as she goes round and round, biding her time…

Hawk’s cigarette broke in two as he stubbed it out in the car’s ashtray. He’d blocked the image almost before it had formed in his mind, but the lapse, however brief, left him shaken.

It was full dusk when he pulled up in front of Loizeau’s antique and curio shop, inconveniently located in the labyrinthine quarter of old Marseilles known as Le Panier. The streets in The Basket were largely deserted at this hour, most of its presidents locked up safe and snug in their upstairs apartments, and all sensible tourists apparently heeding their guidebooks’ warnings against being caught in the area after dark.

It was very quiet; he could barely hear the clanking of the masts in the harbor below. What sounds there were carried through the narrow, sloping streets on dancing tendrils of the mistral, along with the smells of fish, fuel and cooking. Somewhere a baby cried, a radio screeled Middle Eastern dissonances; rival cats sang threats to each other in a nearby alley. A lone car engine gunned, shifting gears, then growled away into silence.

As he stepped out of the car and turned the key in the door lock, Hawk found himself discreetly, and out of old habit, checking to make sure his weapon, a nice Walther 9-millimeter pistol, was where it should be, nestled in its holster against the small of his back.

He paused, fingers still curled around the car keys, to study the building in front of him. Gray stone and stucco, pocked with patches of decay like open sores, but fresh white paint, he noticed, on the wooden door and on the louvered shutters that flanked both second-story and street-level windows. A bedraggled red geranium bloomed in a warped wooden box right below a hand-lettered sign in the downstairs shop window that said, FERME. The other ground-floor windows along the gently curving street were dark and tightly shuttered, while the second- and third-floor shutters stood open to the warm spring wind, spilling yellow light and looping ropes of softly swaying laundry across the darkening canyon below.

Loizeau’s shop was dark, too, but the shutters were still folded back, open and welcoming, and above Hawk’s head the living quarters’ windows were closed up tightly, with not the faintest gleam of light leaking through the slats.

Noting-even enjoying a tittle-the small frisson of unease that stirred across the back of his neck, Hawk stepped to the door of the shop and raised a hand to knock. For a moment more he hesitated, then tapped lightly on the thick, ageroughened wood. He listened, then, calling out, “Loizeau? Ouvrez, s‘il vous plait,” tapped once more.

He drew a breath, held it and closed his fingers around the doorknob. It turned easily. He froze, but only for an instant. His gun was already warm and heavy in the palm of his hand as he eased the door open and slipped silently through it.

He knew at once. He could smell it. Death had been here, recently and almost certainly with violence.

Every sense-including a well-developed sixth-on full alert, Hawk crouched low and waited. He listened with every nerve, every cell in his body, listened for the sounds of fear and menace, stifled breathing, adrenaline-driven heartbeats, the brush of fabric over gooseflesh, the trickle of sweat, the stirring of hackles. Nothing. But his instincts had already told him the room was empty. Whoever had brought Death into it was gone.

But not long gone. If he needed more evidence of that fact, it came when his free hand, braced on the floor for balance, encountered a sticky warmth. He noted it automatically and without revulsion, while another part of his mind was on instant replay, reviewing every detail of every impression it had recorded from the moment he’d driven into that street. Crying baby, radio, fighting cats…a car shifting gears, driving away…

Five minutes, he thought. If I’d been five minutes sooner…

He stood, his movements brisk and efficient now, hitting the light switch with his elbow as he tucked his gun back into its holster. The shopkeeper, Loizeau, lay on his back near the door and stared sightlessly at the ceiling. He appeared to do so with three eyes; the one in the center of his forehead oozed a dark, congealing trickle. Other