Tiago looked down at the station platform, from the parlor car in which he stood, at Quinn Murdock, all prim, and proper, and appalled, as beautiful as ever, even dissing his train. His heart raced at the implications--Quinn, for three days, neither of them on the wrong, or right, side of the tracks, but square in the middle. Maybe, he’d get some long-overdue answers. Maybe . . . they’d finally kill each other. Quinn stepped away to read the plaque on the railroad car, and the sun came out and gilded her hair to copper. Then the wind lifted it around her face, and Tiago could swear he caught its scent. He remembered the silk of it sliding between his fingers. His body remembered as well. “Mickey Mantle?” Quinn asked, the sudden set of her lips enhancing his hard reaction. She stepped back and read the names of the baseball greats on several railroad cars. “You wouldn’t!” She turned on her gofers, and they stepped collectively back. “I told you about Tiago in confidence!” Tiago’s heart skipped. Thirteen years, and she still talked about him? “Please!” Quinn said, “Tell me this moldering old excuse for a locomotive is not Tiago’s Hot-Ticket Express to Spring Training!” “This is not Tiago’s Hot-Ticket Express to Spring Training,” Charm Boy lied as ordered. Tiago braced himself, as much against the train’s first halting surge as against the razor-sharp blade of Quinn’s presence slicing open his sorry past and threatening to make him bleed. “Let’s get you on board,” Charm Boy said. “Damn train’s starting to move.” Despite Quinn’s protest, the man shoved her, ass-up, onto the train while Tiago bit off an objection to the familiarity. Quinn gave her attention to fighting and cursing the ham-fisted jerk behind her, so she didn’t know who stepped out and caught her hand to keep her from falling on the tracks--couldn’t know that touching her again revved more than the Amtrak engine up front. “Traitors,” she shouted as she turned, retrieved her hand, and caught her balance, still focused on the tricksters who got her here. Charm Boy sprinted beside the train and tossed two suitcases in after her. One hit the floor at her feet, split, and belched enough gauze and spandex to make a hooker proud. The second broke the bones in Tiago’s left foot. “Effing-A,” Quinn said as she fell to her knees, rescued a rippling cellophane halter top, and shoved it back in the bag’s gaping belly. She rifled through the rainbow of bare-flesh wet dreams, and with rising anxiety, she checked the second bag, a street-walker’s shoe store. “Where’s my underwear?” she shouted. “Derek, there’s no underwear!” Her male gofer grinned, saluted, and stopped trying to keep up, and as the distance grew between them, he rubbed his hands together at a job well done. Quinn’s female contingent caught up to him, and they high-fived each other. Quinn screeched when she saw, and about gave Tiago a stroke when she leaned out the door. “Loserrrrrrs!” The losers grinned, nodded, and waved. Tiago caught the death-defying tigress around the waist and hauled her back in, against her will, his heart racing over her stunt, her scent, her lush familiar curves. “Damn, but I forgot what a pain in the ass you are.” Quinn Murdock--the only woman who ever ran away from him--in his arms again. Tiago held her against him, eye to eye, her feet about six inches off the ground. “Son of an effing bustard,” she snapped. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Put me down you dumbass gorilla.” Tiago chuckled. “I missed you too.” The pointed toes of her biker-type knee boots made hard contact with his shins. He set her down. “Son of a-- A few more bruises, Hot Stuff, and I’ll end up shining the bench at spring training.” “Turn your back on me, and you won’t make that cut. Despite her bluster, Quinn stepped away from him to come up against the undulating Pullman car at her back. Tiago’s heart skipped when the chasm between the platform and the car opened and closed beneath her, as if trying to suck her down and swallow her whole. “Get your sweet ass away from there.” He offered his hand, but Quinn’s eyes narrowed to sparks of fiery emerald, so he grabbed her by the waist and lifted her off her feet to set her down in a safe spot between the car doors. He brought her bags over as well. “Got any tassels in there?” he asked, catching a flying scrap of silk like a line drive to second. Then he pressed a button to shut the doors and cut the whirlwind trying to suck her wardrobe into oblivion. Quinn snatched the silky scrap from his texture-testing fingers. “Leave it to you to call your employees losers,” he said. She shoved the scrap in her pocket. “They’re not my employees. They’re my friends.” “You have friends?” She placed a fast boot heel on her belching bag to nail a diaphanous strip of pink champagne and keep it from floating away. Tiago grinned. “With all that leather you’re wearing, I keep looking for your whip.” “You wouldn’t know haute couture if it bit you in the butt.” “Stop it, you’re turning me on.” “Bite me.” “There you go again.” Quinn tried to toss her hair over her shoulders, an assertive, attention-getter she’d used as a teen, except that her long nutmeg “wings” had been clipped, likely for the boardroom, and there was no length left. Short, stylish, and businesslike, her hair fell longest around her face where it curled beneath her chin and met like the inside point of an inverted heart, framing her features into a sassy, sexy whole while showcasing the sweet, sublime line of her neck. She firmed her spine and raised her chin. Twice as hot as the designer-chic curves revealed by the calfskin outfit she’d been shoe-horned into that morning, Quinn Murdock had never looked better, except for maybe the first time he saw her . . . in the sandbox. They were five. She gave him a black eye. It was love at first smite. | 
