Illegal Possession Read Free Page B

on both. He could be utterly ruthless in business, but Dallas Cameron would never step outside the morality he’d established for himself. He didn’t break laws, and he didn’t break people; there were no footprints on other backs from Dallas’s climb to the top. Not many successful businessmen of thirty-six could claim that they had never hurt another human being through business practices, intentionally or not; Dallas, had he been asked, could say just that with absolute honesty.
    There
had
been hurt that he realized he was responsible for at least in part in his personal—which was to say romantic—life. But those hurts had been unintentional and were, even now, deeply regretted. That was a major reason why Dallas, as the saying went, played the field. Dallas wanted no scalps dangling from his belt.
    Still, a man could control certain aspects of his life, he believed. A man made choices. He decided whether or not to abuse alcohol and drugs. He chose a certain life-style. He obeyed laws or broke them. He treated people with honor or he didn’t. And sometimes he set himself a moral code he believed in, and he lived within it.
    Troy. Whether her intentions sprang from the best or worst of motives, she nonetheless broke the law. Stealing, for whatever reason, was legally and morally
wrong
.
    Dallas heard himself laugh shortly.
    “That’s odd: you laughed, but you look as if you were contemplating throwing yourself into the Reflecting Pool.”
    The voice was cheerful, a breath of spring on a winter day, and before Dallas could rise, she was sitting on the step beside him. He half turned, ridiculously eager to see Troy in the honest light of day. And his first thought was that the shadows of last night had cheated him. Badly.
    She was smaller, for one thing; not much over five feet tall, he guessed. She was wearing a sheepskin jacket over a black turtleneck sweater and faded jeans, her small feet encased in scuffed desert boots. Her face was as delicately lovely as he remembered, her smooth ivory complexion untouched by freckles and radiating a rare translucence. Her large eyes were tilted at the outer ends in a catlike manner, and were green with gold flecks. Or…gold with green flecks. Odd; he wasn’t sure which.
    Her brows, too, were slanted, giving her an uncanny air of mystery. Well-molded cheekbones, a delicately straight nose, a firm jaw and chin, a long slender neck—and a beautiful mouth curved with pure laughter. And she was a redhead.
    Dallas didn’t doubt for a moment that Troy was a true redhead. Her vivid hair was the color of a flame, the color women and their hairdressers strove for in vain because it could never come out of a bottle. Falling to just below her shoulder blades, her hair was styled simply; parted in the center, it was thick and slightly wavy, curling under at the ends. And it shone like burnished bronze, Dallas thought, looking vibrantly alive even in winter’s weak sunshine.
    “Finished with the inventory?”
    Dallas blinked and tried to concentrate enough to string a few words together that made reasonable sense. She wasn’t, he realized, either annoyed or disturbed by his scrutiny. If anything, she was simply amused. He looked into the strangely shifting colors of her eyes and found no conceit there, not even an awareness of her own beauty.
    Impossible, he told himself. She couldn’t possibly not
know
….
    “Sorry,” he muttered, unable to stop staring.
    Troy leaned back against the step behind her, resting her weight on her elbow. “Did you know that this memorial is made of Colorado marble?” she asked conversationally. “It has thirty-six Doric columns, which represent the number of states in the Union when Lincoln was killed.”
    She wore no rings, he noticed, and her hands were slender with long, clever fingers and unpolished nails that were neat ovals. “No,” he said finally. “I didn’t know that.”
    Troy nodded toward the pool and the Washington Monument.