by Nora Roberts
“Uh-oh,” she murmured.
“Damn it, Cleo.” He crushed his throbbing, bleeding mouth to hers. She tasted of sin and smelled like a rain-washed garden. Beneath his, her mouth opened, and it took every bit as greedily. Her limbs wrapped around him again, but silkily this time. She arched, center to center in a slow, sinuous invitation.
He lifted his head and looked down at her. Her hair, all that warm, damp sable, was spread over the thin, burn-scarred carpet. Her lashes were still set with those mock tears. He wanted to devour her, one quick gulp, no matter how it might make his belly ache afterward. He was rock hard and randy.
And he found himself blocked by the same set of values that had prevented him from striking her.
“Damn it,” he said again and pushed off her to sit with his back braced against the bed.
Baffled, she levered onto her elbows. “What’s the matter?”
“Get dressed, Cleo. I said I wouldn’t hurt you. I won’t use you, either.”
She sat back up on her heels as she studied him. His eyes were closed, his breath ragged. She had good reason to know he was aroused. But he’d stopped. Stopped, she realized, because despite the toughness, the cool calculation she’d recognized in him, he was decent. Right down to the marrow.
“You’re the genuine article, aren’t you?”
He opened his eyes to see her smiling thoughtfully. “What?”
“Just one question. Did you back off because I’m a currently unemployed stripper?”
“I backed off because whatever you say about partnerships, I’m responsible for you being here. For you having to run out of Prague and across the continent to England with the clothes on your back. I made the choice to go after these statues, and to take the consequences knowing someone was going to try to stop me, however they could. You didn’t have the choice.”
“That’s what I thought,” she replied. “That means I’ll just have to take you down again.”
“Cut it out,” he warned when she slithered like a snake into his lap.
“You can just lie back and take it.” She ran her tongue over his jaw. “Or you can participate. Up to you, Slick. But either way, I’m having you. Umm, you’re all hot and sweaty.” When he clamped his hands on her wrists, she just continued to use her mouth. “I like it. This’ll go easier on you if you cooperate.”
She rocked on him, then covered his mouth with hers when he moaned.
“Touch me.” It had been so long since she’d had a man’s hands on her. Since she’d wanted them on her. “Touch me.”
In one rough move, he had her on her back again, and his hands were everywhere. The floor was hard as rock, smelled of stale smoke, but they rolled over it as she tugged at his shirt, as she dug her nails into his back.
She’d wanted this. Even knowing it was stupid, it was pointless, she’d wanted him. Every time she’d felt his gaze linger on her, every night she’d lain awake knowing he was lying awake an arm’s length away, she’d wanted him.
The good, solid weight of him pressed her into the unyielding floor, those strong, hard hands streaked over her. She bowed up when he dragged her bra down to her waist, moaned in pleasure when his mouth ravaged her breast.
Her body was a banquet. Sleek and curvy with generous breasts, endless legs. He’d wanted to feast since he’d first seen her strut onstage in her man’s clothes with that knowing smirk on her fabulous face.
He couldn’t think about how it was a mistake. He could only think how much he needed to feed.
He found her mouth again, and pain and pleasure warred through him. She was dragging his jeans down, raking her nails over his hips. And his blood was a raging hammer blasting against his heart, in his head.
Then he was inside her, rammed deep, and she was already coming around him on a wild, wet burst.
“Jesus!” Her eyes flew open and were nearly black with shock. “Jesus, what was that?”
“I don’t know, but let’s try it again.” Even as she shuddered, he drove himself into her in fast, nearly violent strokes. He heard her gasp for air, saw the fresh flush of heat flood her cheeks. Then she was matching him, beat for frantic beat.
And on the instant when he lost himself in her, she dragged his mouth back to hers.
Eight
CLEO lay facedown and crossways on a mattress that had all the yield of concrete. Her lungs had stopped wheezing, and the roar of blood in her ears had subsided to a pleasant hum.
She’d had her first sexual experience at sixteen when, after a fight with her mother, she’d let Jimmy Moffet do what he’d been begging her to let him do for three months.
The earth hadn’t moved, but as initiators went, Jimmy had been all right.
In the eleven years since, she’d had better, and she’d had worse, and she’d learned to be selective. She’d learned what pleasured her own body and how to guide a man to satisfy her needs.
She’d made some mistakes, of course, Sidney Walter being the most recent and the most costly. But by and large she thought she had a good, healthy sex drive and a reasonably discriminating taste in bed partners.
It was true that drive had diminished radically during her stint as a performer at Down Under, but strip clubs tended to show men and sex at their most basic and ordinary. In the same way, she imagined that experience had only honed her discrimination.
It certainly seemed to have worked this time around.
Gideon Sullivan not only knew how to make the earth move, he had it doing the merengue. And the tango. And the rumba. The man was a regular Fred Astaire in the sheets.
It was, she decided, going to add a nice dimension to this odd business partnership of theirs.
Not that he considered it a partnership, but she did. And that’s what counted. Plus, she had an ace in the hole. She opened her eyes and looked at the purse that sat on the pockmarked dresser.
Make that a queen in the hole, she mused. A silver queen.
She intended to deal squarely with him when the time came. Probably. But experience had taught her it was wise to keep something in reserve. For all she knew, if she told Gideon about the statue, he’d take off with it just as he had her earrings.
Damn it, she’d really liked those earrings.
Of course, he didn’t seem to be a total prick. The man had ethics when it came to sex, and she respected that. But money was a whole different ball game. It was one thing to heat the sheets with a man she’d known less than a week, and another to trust him with a potential gold mine.
Smarter, much smarter to keep her own counsel and pump him for information.
She rolled over, scraped her teeth along his hip since it was handy. “I didn’t realize you Irish guys had such stamina.”
“Guinness for strength.” His voice was rough with sleep. “Christ Jesus, and I do need a beer.”
“You’ve got a nice build here, Slick.” To please herself she walked her finger up his thigh. “You work out?”
“Like at a gymnasium? No. Bunch of sweaty guys and terrifying machinery.”
“You run?”
“If I’m in a hurry.”
She laughed and slithered up to his chest. “So what do you do back in Ireland?”
“We have boats.” He stirred himself to trail fingers into her hair. He really liked all that dense, dark hair of hers. “Tour boats, fishing boats. Sometimes I run tourists around, sometimes I fish, and half the time I’m hammering one of the bloody boats into proper repair.”
“That explains these.” She pinched his biceps. “Tell me more about the Fates.”
“I told you already.”
“You told me some of the history stuff. But that doesn’t tell me how you’re so sure they’re worth a lot of money. Why it’s worth our time to try to track them down. I’ve got an investment here, too, and I don’t even know for certain who the hell chased me out of Prague.”
“I know they’re worth a lot of money, first, because my sister, Rebecca, researched them. Becca’s a demo
n with research and facts and data.”
“No offense, Slick, but I don’t know your sister.”
“She’s brilliant. Has so much information in her brain I’m always expecting it to start spilling out of her ears. It was she who pushed the whole idea of the touring business on the family. She was only about fifteen and here she comes up to Ma and Da with all these figures and projections and systems she’d put together. The economy was going to boom, she was sure of it. And with Cobh already of interest to tourists because of the Titanic and the Lusitania, and the fine scenery and harbor, we’d only have the more of them as time went on.”
She forgot for a moment that she was luring him into giving her more information. “They listened to her?” The idea of parents paying any attention to the ideas of a child seemed both fascinating and ridiculous.
“Sure they listened to her. Why wouldn’t they? ’Twasn’t as if they jumped up shouting, ‘Well, of course, if Bec says to do it, then we must.’ But it was discussed and picked over and hammered at until the conclusion was reached that she had a fine notion there, one worth exploring.”
“My parents wouldn’t have listened.” She settled her head on his chest. “Of course, by the time I was fifteen, we’d stopped having what you could define as conversations.”
“Why would that be?”
“Ah, let’s see. Oh right, I remember. We don’t like each other.”
Curious, and struck by the sheer bitterness in her tone, he rolled them over so he could see her face. “Why do you think they don’t like you?”
“Because I’m wild, argumentative, nasty and wasted the many opportunities they offered me. Why are you smiling?”
“I was just thinking the first three seem to be why I’m starting to like you. What opportunities did you waste?”
“Education, social advancements, all of which I squandered or threw back in their faces, depending on my mood.”
“Hmm. And why don’t you like them?”
“Because they never saw me.” The minute she said it, she was embarrassed. Where in hell had that come from? To counter it, she wiggled under him and danced her fingers over his ass. “Hey, as long as we’re here . . .”
“What did you want them to see?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She rubbed her foot over his calf in long strokes, lifted her head enough to take a quick nip at his mouth. “We washed our hands of each other some time ago. They pretty much washed hands of each other, too. Stopped pretending to be married when I was sixteen. My mother’s been married twice since. My father just whores around—discreetly.”
“It’s rough on you.”
“Nothing to do with me.” She jerked a shoulder. “Anyway, I’m more interested in now, and whether you’ve got one more round in you before we go get that beer.”
He wasn’t so easily distracted once he’d pinned to a point. But he lowered his head to nibble at her throat. “How’d you end up in Prague, working at that club?”
“Stupidity.”
He lifted his head. “That’s a wide area in my experience. What specific form?”
She huffed out a breath. “If I’m not going to get laid again, I want to take a shower.”
“I like to know more about the woman I’m making love with than her name.”
“Too late, Slick. You already fucked me.”
“The first time I fucked you,” he said in a cool, steady voice that made her feel ashamed. “The second time it was more. If we go on this way, there’ll be more yet. That’s how it works.”
It sounded, quite a bit, like a threat. “Do you complicate everything?”
“I do, yes. It’s a talent of mine. You said they didn’t see you. Well, I’m looking at you, Cleo, and I’m going to keep looking until I see clearly. Let’s see how you deal with that.”
“I don’t like being pushed.”
“That’s a problem, then, as I’m pushy.” He rolled off her. “You can have the shower first, but make it snappy. I’m half starved to death and dying for a beer.”
He folded his hands on his belly, shut his eyes.
Frowning, Cleo climbed off the bed. On her way to the bath, she shot him one last curious look, then grabbed her purse and shut herself in the bathroom.
Confused her, Gideon thought. That was fine as she sure confused the hell out of him.
HE WAITED UNTIL they were settled at one of the low tables in the pub, she with her tough little steak, he with the better choice of fish and chips.
“Being as your family’s of New York society, would you know Anita Gaye?”
“Never heard of her.” The steak required a great deal of work, but she wasn’t going to complain about it. “Who is she?”
“You know Morningside Antiquities?”
“Sure. It’s one of those old, snooty places where rich people pay too much for things that used to belong to other rich people.” She tossed back her mass of hair. “Me, I like bright, shiny and new.”
He grinned. “That’s a damning description, particularly by a rich person.”
“I’m not rich. My family is.”
Privately, he thought anyone who paid more than three hundred American dollars for something that dangled from the earlobes was either rich or foolish. Possibly both. “No inheritance?”
She shrugged, sawed at the beef. “I’ve got a nice pile due when I hit thirty-five. That won’t keep me in beer and pretzels for the next eight years.”
“Where’d you learn to dance?”
“What does Morningside have to do with our current situation?”
“All right then. Anita Gaye is, at the moment, in charge of Morningside, being the widow of the former proprietor.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” She wagged her fork. “I remember something about that. Old dude marries sharp young chick. Worked for him or something. My mother got all righteous about it, lunched on the horror for weeks. Then when he kicked off, there was a whole second round. I was still speaking, on rare occasions, to my mother then. She was back in New York between husbands. And I said something like, if the bimbo saw to it the old goat died happy, what’s the diff? She, my mother, got all pissed off about it. I guess that was one of our last bouts before we did the Pontius Pilate routine.”
“Washed your hands of each other?”
“Bingo.”
“Over someone else’s dead husband?”
“Actually, the hand-washing came when her latest husband got a little grabby with my tits and I was annoyed enough to tell her about it.”
“Your stepfather touched you?” His tone was filled with moral outrage.
“He wasn’t my stepfather right at that point. And it was more of a grab boobs, squeeze boobs, resulting in my knee rammed into his groin sort of event rather than touching. I said he’d come on to me, and he, in a rare use of gray matter, countered that I’d come on to him. She bought his side, foul language issued from all interested parties. I left, she married him, and they moved to his turf. L.A.”
She shrugged, lifted her beer. “End of sentimental family saga.”
He touched the back of her hand. “I suppose she deserves him, then.”
“I suppose she does.” She shook it off, drank down beer. “So Anita Gaye applies to us because . . . She’s the one who backed the muscle who went after us in Prague?” Cleo pursed her lips. “Maybe not such a bimbo.”
“She’s a calculating, devious woman. And a thief. She has one of the Fates because she stole it from us. From my brother, specifically. She wants all three and won’t quibble about the method of acquiring them. That’s something we’ll use against her.