Water From the Moon by Terese Ramin Read Free Book Online

judgment would be even more impaired by my emotional involvement with you than it already is."
    There was a moment of silence pervaded by nearness; then Cameron broke it. "You still think you know what’s best for everyone, don’t you?" he asked. "And I’d forgotten how damn arrogant you can be. What makes you think the way you see things is the only way there is to see them?"
    "It’s not what I think that matters. It’s what I know. I’ve gone after too many men who’ve reached the point you’re at. They question who they are and what they’ve done and wonder if there isn’t some challenge they ought to meet, some test they ought to take to prove themselves before they hit the skids on the road to forty or fifty—or sixty. If they listen to you at all, they don’t do what you say—maybe because you’re a woman, maybe for other reasons. Then they need a tour guide to get them back to where they started from so they can live long enough to regale their peers with tales of what they did. I’ve been here before, Cam. That’s why people hire me—for my expertise."
    "I didn’t realize one simple little business trip would make me a stereotype."
    "If it were simple, Cam, I wouldn’t be here."
    "No," he agreed, "you wouldn’t. And neither would I." He studied a patch of light that wavered on the floor, and Acasia, watching him, could almost hear him thinking. "I spent two months looking for you after that last letter of yours," he said. "It was so full of garbage that I knew you were in trouble, and I wanted to help. I located your father in Saint Tropez, on the trail of some missing piece of art or other, and he told me the last he’d heard you were alive, if not well, and that when you were able to see me you’d contact me yourself. So, like a good boy, I went home and waited. It took me nearly three years to decide you weren’t coming back. It was another five before I forgave you for it. The point is, if you’d come to me, I think I might have listened."
    Emotion stung Acasia’s throat and burned behind her eyelids. "Cam, I—" Her voice came out a croak. "Two months?"
    Cameron nodded. "As I recall," he said, "I loved you."
    He left her standing in the darkness then, telling herself that what he’d said didn’t touch her, didn’t matter, didn’t change anything as far as she was concerned. And then she ruined the delusion by wondering why he’d said anything about love at all.
    With an oath that was far from ladylike, Acasia yanked off her sweaty T–shirt and turned on the water in the sink. She filled her hands with the tepid, slightly pungent stuff, then spread it over her face, across her chest and down her back. Deliberately she forced herself to think about mundane, everyday things—like how, at this moment, she would have given a year’s pay in equal shares for a real shower, a crisp, clean blouse and water that didn’t have to be purified to be drunk. How much of the past ten or eleven years had she spent in filthy clothes and jungles—here and elsewhere—looking over her shoulder, trying to keep herself and someone else alive? Not counting the thirteen straight months she’d spent here with Fred after her stint in the military, and before she’d become partners with Paolo and Julianna, there might be as few as three years’ worth of days, as many as six. Either way, too many.
    And who chose hostage retrieval as a line of work? she asked herself. Who created the position out of thin air? You, that’s who.
    Sighing, she put her shirt in the sink to soak and sluiced more water over herself. One of these days she’d chuck the business. Maybe she should have done it years ago. Trouble was, if she’d gotten out, who would have come for Cam? It was not, she decided, a good line of thought.
    She shut her eyes and concentrated on the water running down her back to be absorbed in the waistband of her pants. Cameron’s hand had sat there, in the small of her back, callused fingers dipping