Dark Burning: Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller Book 6

by Lori Ryan

  Merritt stilled next to him for a second, her face a question without the words.

  “I just thought maybe we could try this as more than a one-night-thing.” He tried to keep his tone casual as his hand continued to work up and down her arm.

  They were on her couch—the one in the living room this time—and she was snuggled against his side, a glass of wine in her hand.

  “I’d like that,” she said, quietly.

  “I thought you didn’t like me,” he teased.

  She lifted a shoulder and gave him a mock pout. “Eh, you’re all right.” She pretended to think. “And you feed me pizza. That helps.”

  He reached and pulled her across him onto his lap. “I’m gonna make you take that back.”

  “What, that I like pizza?” She was trying to pretend she wasn’t affected but she was already moving her hips against him and her breath was coming heavier as he leaned up to capture her mouth with his own.

  “Witch,” he said when he broke apart to undo the snaps down the front of her shirt. He’d never seen a blouse with snaps up the front instead of buttons. He was a huge fan. “I graduated to the couch in the living room. That has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

  He stopped to stare at her breasts behind the peach colored lace of her bra. Hell, this woman was incredible. She whimpered in need, prompting him to motion. As he closed his mouth over one of her breasts over the lace, he thanked his lucky stars. He didn’t deserve this at all, but he was still damned grateful to be in her arms.

  “You taste incredible,” he said, moving to the other side. He thought he could feast on her for hours. Days, maybe.

  She didn’t let him, removing her shirt and then reaching for his.

  He liked that about her, too. She wasn’t at all afraid to show him what she wanted or to take control in their lovemaking. God, that was a hell of a turn-on.

  He shifted on the couch as his jeans grew too damned tight. He should feel guilty for taking any time for anything but a short sleep and some fast food right now, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to be anywhere other than with Merritt.

  He lifted her to stand before him, then lifted his hips and wriggled out of his jeans, his boxers coming with them. She watched him, her eyes lighting on his erection as soon as it was freed. The look from her was almost erotic, tantalizing.

  He sat up and reached for her, putting his hands to the side of her breasts and running them down her waist to her hips and thighs, then around to her ass.

  He groaned when she licked her lips. He didn’t think she had a damned clue how enticing those little movements were. Or the sounds she made when he touched her.

  She reached behind her and undid her bra and he unzipped the zipper on her pants. And then he was lost.

  Drifting on the feel and taste of Merritt on the overload of his senses. On the power he felt when he brought her to orgasm and had to cover her mouth so she didn’t wake Collin. On the sensation of wholeness when he plunged into her and then held still with her wrapped around him as he tried but failed to catalogue what he was feeling.

  Merritt lay beneath Eric in the hazy melty feeling that always came after great sex. Although, she didn’t honestly think she had ever felt quite this melty and hazy with anyone else. The places this man took her to were incredible.

  He had the experience for it, she knew. She continued to remind herself that he was a player, tried and true. He’d told her that the first night they met and had reminded her several times.

  Just because he said he wanted to do something more now didn’t mean she wouldn’t be an idiot if she counted on that. He had been pretty vague in what that something else might be. She couldn’t exactly run full on into letting herself fall for this guy. Especially not when she had Collin to think about.

  And she sure as heck wasn’t taking a chance on becoming a mom again without a man she really and truly believed was committed to her wholeheartedly. If any sperm was getting to her eggs, it was going to have to go through the condom they’d used and through her IUD.

  She frowned. She didn’t think that was the right way to say that. An IUD didn’t technically stop sperm from meeting egg. But still, double protection should hopefully prevent any unplanned pregnancies.

  “Wow, what is that look for?” Eric asked, pulling back from where he’d collapsed on her.

  Merritt brushed away the frown and smiled. “Oh, sorry, I was just thinking about something.”

  A look of shock and she thought maybe a little genuine insecurity crossed his face. “Woman, if you can think right now, I didn’t do my job right.”

  She wound her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her. “Oh, you did it right. But if you want more practice, I’ll never object to that.”

  He buried his head in her neck and chuckled low and deep. “You’re killing me, woman. Killing me. I need at least ten minutes.” He stopped and considered it. “Maybe five. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Merritt laughed, though she had to admit it was breathier than she would have liked. “How about something to eat instead? I ate a little of Collin’s pasta tonight, but I wasn’t very hungry when we had dinner. I could use some food.”

  Eric grumbled low and deep again at her neck and she faltered, thinking she might just want to stay on that couch with him forever. She wasn’t ready to feel that so she forced herself to put her hands to his chest with a laugh and push him up.

  “Okay, food it is,” he said, hopping up and taking her hand to pull her up beside him. He was completely casual and comfortable in his naked state and she felt self-conscious, looking for her clothes.

  “After another kiss,” he said, interrupting her search as he pulled her to him. His kiss was full-body. He pressed her against him and took her mouth, slowly tasting her again.

  Lord, this man was scrambling her senses and her brains.

  “Okay, food,” he said, pulling away with a slowness that said he didn’t want to. “Do you have anything or do we need to order something?”

  “I’ve got cheese and crackers, salad, and pasta.” She sifted through her refrigerator in her mind. “Maybe some apples and peanut butter.”

  “I’m easy,” he said, banding his arms around her waist and walking toward the kitchen with her in his grip.

  Merritt laughed and shoved at him but she had to admit it felt much too good to have someone in the house with her. A week ago she would have said having company would be nice. This was more than nice. It felt right.

  And because of that, it felt entirely too scary.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “You sound happy. Really happy. What happened?”

  Merritt laughed at the almost accusation in her friend’s voice. “Nothing happened. I’m happy, that’s all.”

  She shouldn’t be happy, actually. Jason Wilson had somehow convinced their boss that it made sense to spread the coverage of her fire case out to other reporters, so he was writing up the report of the latest fire.

  She was hoping the fact that Eric and the precinct were cooperating with her would get her a lead she could bring to her boss to get the story back. That’s the way the newsroom was. One minute you were up and then next you had to fight for your position again.

  She and Gabby were taking a phone lunch break. The kind where they each grabbed lunch then found a quiet corner somewhere to hole up and talk while they ate. It was the kind of thing they would have done in person before she moved.

  Gabby made a noise in her throat that said she wasn’t buying Merritt’s explanation for her happy state.

  “Okay,” Merritt looked around to gauge how isolated she was. She was in a quiet corner of a local park. There were kids playing on the playground but they and their parents were too far away from her to hear. The occasional jogger might run a lap on the track behind her, but they would pass quickly enough that they wouldn’t get more than a snippet of conversation at a time.

  “Do you remember the cop I told you about?” she said, still sp
eaking low. It would be just her luck to have a member of the force jogging by her when she was talking about her hookup-maybe-turned-something with one of their own.

  “The jerk?”

  Merritt winced. “Um, so it turns out he’s not such a jerk after all.”

  “What?” Gabby practically yelled. “He yelled at you for something you didn’t even do! He basically accused you of sleeping with him to try to get a story.”

  Merritt pressed her lips together. It was true. When Eric found out she was a reporter, he had gone off at her for lying to him.

  She and Gabby had had a good long bitch session over that one because she and Eric had never covered the what do you do for a living thing when they first met. They flirted and, frankly, hopped into bed with embarrassing speed. She didn’t know he was a cop and despite his thinking she should know she was in a cop bar, she didn’t have a clue.

  “Yeah, well it turns out, he’s really great. We’ve kind of been hanging out and he’s really nice.” She almost said Collin loved him, but honestly she was trying to leave Collin out of this even though he’d met Eric and did like him.

  She figured if she and Eric were going to give this thing a go, she would maybe try to keep him at arm’s distance with Collin now until she had a better sense where she and Eric stood. It wasn’t fair to get Collin’s heart tangled up in this.

  “Define hanging out,” Gabby said cautiously.

  “Um… sleeping together.” Her words came out as more of a question than an answer.

  Gabby was quiet.

  Merritt felt like she needed to explain herself, though she didn’t know why. She was a grown up. She had moved away from her family because they couldn’t see that. Still, she respected Gabby’s opinion and wanted to get her take on things.

  She took a deep breath. “So, it started out as a one-night-stand—”

  “You mean a second one-night-stand?” Gabby asked.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Okay,” Gabby said slowly.

  “But we’re working together a bit—he’s been assigned as sort of a press liaison on a case I’m covering for the paper—and we’ve gone to dinner.”

  “Like a date?”

  Merritt deflated a little. “Well, not really. He took Collin and me to get pizza one night.”

  “And?” Gabby asked. “Please tell me there’s more here.”

  “There is. He came over last night and we, um, you know… again. And he said he wants to see where this could go.”

  Gabby was quiet again for a minute and Merritt had to admit, she was holding her breath. She had a feeling her friend was going to say the same thing that had been bothering Merritt all morning.

  She remembered the way Eric had slipped out of the house when Collin woke after their midnight snack. She had been relieved because she wasn’t ready to explain to Collin why Eric was there in the middle of the night with her, but some little piece of her had hurt at the fact she hadn’t had to tell him he had to go.

  “Merritt, did he say where he saw this going or what he could offer? I though he told you he flat out doesn’t do relationships. Is that what you want, Emm?” Gabby had reverted to the nickname she had used when they were younger, calling Merritt by the first letter of her name.

  “No,” Merritt said, knowing her friend was right. “But I really like this guy. Like, really like.”

  “Then you probably need to ask him what he meant by that.”

  “I can’t just quietly get my hopes up and fall for him and hope he gets there, too?”

  Merritt knew the answer to her question before her friend answered. No. She really couldn’t afford to do that. She had a feeling her heart was in play here a lot more than it should be already.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  He paced the room. His mother was sitting in her chair, watching him but not speaking to him. She hadn’t talked to him in a long time. She would whisper sometimes, saying how tired she was, how it just always came back and she couldn’t fight it anymore.

  When she did that, he would go to her and hold her. He’d tell her to hang on. For him.

  He brought his thoughts back to the reporter, talking to his mother even though she wasn’t talking to him. It calmed him to talk to her. “She used to understand. She was the one who got it, but she’s saying everything wrong now.”

  He looked at the photo of Merritt McKenna on the wall. She was with her son, bending over him to smile at something with him.

  He looked through the paper again, hoping she would have another column about the fires. There was nothing there.

  That Jason guy had written the last one and it was all wrong. He didn’t understand. Didn’t see.

  He went to the front of the paper and started tearing off the pages as he scanned them, tossing them in a crumpled pile at his feet. There was nothing there from Merritt.

  Nothing. That wasn’t right. Not right at all.

  He went to the closet, banging his fist on the door and screaming. He stilled and listened. It was quiet. No movement. No sound.

  He turned to the window, but his mother was gone.

  He rubbed his head and looked around, remembering. That’s right. His mother was gone. She had left him. He felt the tears come then. It was easier when he forgot. Easier to live when he didn’t have to remember that his mom hadn’t loved him enough to keep going.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Merritt bit her tongue to keep from saying “that’s not fair.” It was precisely accurate in this case, but it still made her sound like a three-year-old.

  “I’ve had this from the start, Paul.” She looked from her boss to Jason who was trying to hide the smug look on his face but doing a piss poor job of it. Paul had no backbone. He went from putting her on the morning talk show one day to kowtowing to Jason when Jason whined that he should have the arson stories since he was the big man on campus. It was disgusting.

  “You had it when it fell under the crime blotter,” Jason said blandly, referring to the reporting of daily crime in the area. “It’s a bigger story now. I’ve got it.”

  Merritt held her ground. “You didn’t care about it three months ago when no other newspapers had caught onto the serial arsonist in our city. I was the one to pick this up and I’m the one who has the ear of the police department.”

  She almost felt guilty for bringing up her connection to the police department, but in fairness to her relationship with Eric, he had been told to work with her by his bosses long before they decided to … to … whatever it was they were doing now.

  Paul leaned forward. “And we appreciate your work on it. You did a great job getting us the scoop on this before anyone else. And you can keep working the case with your contacts in the department but you’ll turn over anything you get to Jason. He’s covering this now, McKenna.”

  Merritt burned. She would keep working it all right, but she’d be damned if she was going to turn over any leads to Jason. She would work them, write up the columns her way and submit them to Paul. If he wanted to turn her columns over to Jason, that was on him. But she wasn’t going to just back down meekly on this.

  Besides, she had a following on their online site now. She’d bet her readers wanted to hear more from her on this and they’d be vocal.

  She left the office, trying to figure out if there was a way for her to let her readers subtly know she needed them to back her on this. A way to do it without getting herself fired. Maybe she could matter-of-factly announce she’d been moved off the coverage on her Facebook page and then let them do their thing?

  It was risky but it could work. She chewed her lip. It could also make her look petty.

  She sat at her desk and opened her tablet, pulling up the working file she always kept with ideas for stories. She stared at the list. There were half formed ideas and some that were only tiny snippets of an idea, nothing formed or formulated yet. It was a running list she kept so that she always had something to bring to her boss during slow times when she was
n’t assigned a beat.

  Nothing on the page jumped out at her. She should be covering this arson, not moving onto something new.

  She closed her list and opened a browser on her computer, then closed it again. She needed to find some angle on this case that would let her pull it back to her. Maybe she could cover the human side of it. The loss to the families. The devastation caused by this arsonist.

  She could reach out again to Mrs. Johnson. The older woman had seemed lonely, so Merritt wouldn’t mind going over and visiting with her again anyway. She probably should do it anyway, regardless of her story. She could also contact the Cho family and see how they were doing.

  She rubbed her forehead. She hated to give up working on the criminal aspect of this, but at least she could keep her hand in things if she came up with a fluff piece about the toll the arsons were taking on the victims.

  She grabbed her purse and tablet and headed for the elevators. She wasn’t going to just walk away from the story she’d covered for months, and she wasn’t going to let Jason Wilson shove her out of the picture just because she was the new person on the paper. To hell with that. She was going to find a way to turn this story around.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  They were working an arson and homicide now instead of an arson on its own. They would look at the murder in the context of the fires, but also work it separately in case it was an isolated incident made to look like it was connected. Not that it was likely that someone else could have known that the fires were being started in the closets so they could mimic that signature, but they would work it both ways to be sure.