She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t look away from him. “Why? After all these years, why would it matter to you whether I lived or died?”

“God only knows. It could be that all during those years, I never permitted you close. It’s only after Doane made me pay attention to you that I began to feel … something.” His lips twisted. “And how I fought it. It was only the night of the fire at that ghost town in Colorado that I realized that you had become … necessary. It stunned me.” He paused before he added hoarsely, “And it broke me.”

“Nothing could break you.”

“No?”

“And I don’t want you to kill for me, Zander. I only wanted you to care.” She gestured with frustrated impatience. “Or for you, it could be the same thing. I don’t know why it matters to me anyway. But it does. It does. Maybe there’s a reason that we came together. I don’t want anything here unresolved when I go to Bonnie.”

“I’ve given you the only answer I can, Eve.” The intensity suddenly left his face. “And don’t be in too much of a hurry to tie up loose ends. I have no intention of letting you go to Bonnie anytime soon.”

“You’d be more convincing if you weren’t cuffed hand and foot, one arm in a cast, and with no weapons and—” She frowned. “I can’t believe you let Doane catch you.”

“I appreciate your faith in my prowess, but he counted on the fact that he’d catch me off guard.”

“And he did it?”

“What do you think? No man is perfect. Though I do come close.”

“You’re better than Doane. You ran rings around him in that forest in Colorado.” She paused, gazing at him in despair. And this Zander was the same man she had met in that forest. Even though he appeared helpless, as Doane had claimed, there was an aura of confidence and power that had been there when she was his prisoner. “I could wish that if you were going to get yourself caught, you’d choose a time when there wasn’t so much in the balance.”

“Your life? No, you’re talking about those nukes that Doane wants to set off to honor his idiot son.”

“You know about them?”

He sighed. “I’ve heard nothing but how irresponsible it is that I don’t give my full cooperation and sacrifice personal will to the CIA, Homeland Security, and a zillion other bureaucrats. Catherine Ling is very vocal on the subject.”

“Catherine? What does she have to do with this?”

“What doesn’t she have to do with it?” he said dryly. “She barged into my life and announced I had to be kept alive so that I’d be a decent barter for you. She even had the nerve to appoint herself my bodyguard. I had a hell of a time slipping away from her tonight.”

“I can imagine you would.” But she had trouble with the concept that even Catherine had been bold enough to confront Zander in his lair. It was both bizarre and humorous. “But she’d want more than me in that barter if she knew about those nukes.”

“Yes, but you were the primary prize.” He inclined his head toward her. “You’re the primary prize for all of us, Eve. Except, perhaps, Venable.”

“Then Venable is the one who is right,” she said soberly. “And you should have paid attention to what Catherine was saying.”

“I paid attention. But every one of those organizations would take me down if they could. I have problems working with anyone that I know will turn on me after they get what they want.” He smiled faintly, “And it would happen, Eve. They would make promises, then find it convenient to forget. That’s the world as I know it. It’s the world you know, too.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Then what does matter?”

“The children.”

“Ah, but of course.”

“And the parents who gave them life. I’m not important at all when you put those on the scale.”

“I beg to differ. But, then, I’m far more callous than you’d ever dream of being. After decades, I’ve only managed to care about one individual, and you mustn’t expect me to suddenly throw open the gates to anyone else. It’s not going to happen.”

“I don’t expect anything from you. You bewilder me.” He had said he cared about her but she didn’t know how she felt about him. He was completely out of her experience. Perhaps he was out of everyone’s experience.

But she wanted to know him, she realized suddenly. He had been an emptiness within her, and she had put that emptiness aside and tried to forget it existed. How long had she lived with that secret bitterness she would not admit even to herself?

Release it. It would only corrode and hurt her if she held it close. But she had to know one thing more than he had told her.

“Did you … love my mother?”

“Sandra?” He slowly shook his head. “Sex. Pure sex. And she cared nothing for me. We met in Florida when we were just teenagers. We were both wild and hungry for life. After high school, I’d gotten a job working on a freighter that was due to leave Daytona in four weeks for South Africa. Sandra’s mother had brought her down there on vacation, and she was partying on the beach every night.” He shrugged. “So was I. Booze and drugs and sex. Sandra liked them all. I wasn’t the first or the last man that she took under that pier to screw.” His gaze was on her face. “You don’t like my saying that. You’re protective of Sandra even though she wasn’t a good mother to you.”

“No, I don’t like it. But I asked you, and I’m not ignorant about Sandra’s past.” She paused. “And she was good to my Bonnie when she was alive. She loved her. Everyone loved her.” And she vaguely remembered Sandra’s telling her about that vacation in Florida and that Eve was conceived at that time. “If she was that promiscuous, how did you know I was your daughter?”

“I didn’t.” He grimaced. “The next week I took off for Johannesburg. Three months later, I received a letter from Sandra telling me that she was pregnant and that she was certain that the kid was mine. I didn’t believe her.”

“Why not?”

“Because my shipmate, George Royce, who had also spent a good amount of time beneath the pier with Sandra, received a letter stating that she was sure George was the father. I figured that she had just sent out letters to all of her partners, hoping that one of us would believe her. She wasn’t too bright to send a letter to both George and me. She might have known we might talk to each other.”

No, Sandra had never been bright. “Desperation?”

“Perhaps.” He was silent. “But I preferred to think she was victimizing me. It was more convenient. I wasn’t a particularly good kid, but I still had a few ingrained scruples left at that period of my life. Enough to feel a twinge of guilt. I sent her some money and turned my back on her.”

“But you came back later. Why did you come back?”

He shrugged. “Curiosity? That possibility always stayed with me. Maybe because those nights in Daytona were the last carefree time I had before my life changed.” He corrected, “No, before I changed. I’m the one who joined a mercenary army in Johannesburg and discovered my true vocation. Any blame belongs solely to me, not fate. I learned to accept that truth with no excuses. That’s probably why I wanted to make sure that I’d made the right decision about Sandra.”

“And how did you do that?”

“DNA. It was difficult, but I managed to get your hairbrush and a blood sample.”

She stiffened. “And what did the DNA show?”

“That for once Sandra had told me the truth,” he said quietly. “You’re my daughter, Eve.”

She inhaled sharply. She had been expecting it, but his words still came as a shock. “I’m surprised you went to those lengths.”

“I was curious.”

It could be true but she didn’t think that was the entire story. “And if I was a target because I was your daughter, then you had to know that someone else might find it out, too.”

“Someone else did find out. Doane. I wasn’t careful enough when I was checking that DNA. I left a trail. At the time, I had no idea that a man could be so obsessed that he would spend five years hunting down every single bit of my history. I should have known. You wouldn’t be here now if I’d taken care of Doane five years ago.”