Free Zach's Law by Kay Hooper Page B

didn’t answer for a moment, slowly buttoning his shirt as he came into the room. Teddy went ahead and put breakfast on the table, then sat down when he did, and waited. Zach sipped the coffee he had made before going to shave, his expression abstracted.
    Teddy started eating and waited until he followed suit before asking again, “What?”
    He shrugged. “Nothing I can explain. It should be straightforward from here, everything according to plan. But—it smells. There’s something off-center, out of focus. And I don’t know what it is.”
    Teddy couldn’t help him really, except to listen. And when she realized that the restlessness in his eyes wasn’t due entirely to his worry overelusive things, she could hardly help but be encouraged by it. She’d lain awake for hours the previous night, trying to think of some way of reaching him. And her eyes still ached with her tears of despair.
    But if—even now, in the midst of serious concern—he could look at her and want her, then there was still a chance, despite the threat of time running out. Because she was still determined. She loved him, and no matter what Zach thought, that love was very, very real.
    He was visibly restless by the time breakfast was finished. The tape recorders had remained inactive, and he rose after a glance at them to help her clear the table. The area near the sink was cramped, and Teddy was all too conscious of his nearness. She could feel the storm hovering, sending warning gusts of wind toward her, and her fragile control began to splinter.
    She heard her own voice, calm but husky, speak to him. “Is it dangerous, this off-center thing you’re sensing?”
    “Everything’s dangerous in a situation likethis.” Zach was standing beside her, her shoulder almost brushing his arm, and he felt oddly winded, as if something were tightening around his chest, squeezing the breath out of him. He tried in vain to shake off the feeling. “Especially,” he added, “something you can’t put your finger on.”
    He reached to put the bread back on the shelf, and before his arm could fall to his side again, he felt her fingers on his forearm below the rolled-up sleeve of his flannel shirt.
    “Sometimes,” she said, “what you can touch is even more dangerous.”
    He looked at her hand, creamy pale against the smooth bronze skin of his arm. The hand that was so small and slender and trembled a little. Clearing his throat of some mysterious obstruction, he said, “You should always avoid danger—”
    “If you can,” she finished. “I can’t, Zach.”
    He looked, finally, at her face. “I can,” he told her, the sudden hoarseness of his voicegiving the lie to his promise. “I can for both of us.”
    “You?” She almost laughed, a soft sound that was part humor and part vast understanding. “You were born for danger. Shaped for it.” She stepped closer as he automatically turned to face her, and her free hand came to rest on his chest. “You could no more avoid it than another man could willfully stop breathing.”
    “Teddy—”
    “Don’t tell me that what I’m feeling is wrong, that it isn’t real.” Her eyes held the amber fire of a cat’s. “Don’t tell me I’ll get over it. I don’t believe that, Zach, I
won’t
.” She drew a deep breath. “But I won’t make demands on you, I promise. If—if you don’t want to see me when this is over, then I’ll understand.”
    “It’ll be you,” he muttered, “who won’t want to see me.”
    “Don’t count on it.” But her voice was half smiling, because he had, with the statement, implied that there would be a time after this.She hoped. Her hands slid up his chest as his found the curve of her hips, and she tried desperately to rein the wild hunger rising in her, half afraid that what was inside her was too abandoned, too violent.
    Zach’s eyes were half closed, his lashes hiding the darkening gray as he looked broodingly down on her. His hands remained at her hips,