Love by Association

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  He poured and handed the glass to her as she came over to the bar and slid up onto a stool. He yearned for the skirt she’d had on earlier. It would have allowed him to slide off her panties and take her. Right there.

  Obliterate all thought from his mind.

  He slid onto the stool next to her, facing the bar.

  “What’s wrong?” Her tone was soft, caring.

  Looking into the small, gilt-edged mirror on the back wall behind the bar, he caught her studying him. He studied her right back.

  And the world’s grime started to drip away from him. The games and the lies. The compromises of integrity and justice.

  She was one of the more direct women he’d dated and probably the most perceptive.

  She had her hooks in him. And, God help him, he wanted them there.

  * * *

  “JULIE AND I’VE been carrying our secret alone for a lot of years.”

  She’d asked him what was wrong. He talked about secrets.

  “Leslie Morrison knows.”

  “She told you that, too.”

  She was talking to his reflection in the mirror, and he hadn’t turned around to face her. She wasn’t sure why but played along.

  “I asked.”

  “Leslie knew before we agreed not to speak of that night.”

  “You’re so afraid of retribution? What can these men do to you except get some money out of you?”

  “Take away the last vestige of respect that Julie has. Look at her, twenty-seven years old, alone in her room on a Saturday night. Every Saturday night. She doesn’t date. She’s a shadow of who she once was, even after ten years. Do you have any idea what it would do to her to have it all brought up again? To have to appear in court? To lose a case in court and be ordered to pay restitution to the Smyths for the brutality she suffered?”

  Of course she didn’t. Not even close. But she knew how it felt to have been fondled by her stepfather and have her mother blame her for the creep’s interest in her. He’d touched her breasts and...

  Well, what mattered was that eventually Chantel had kneed him in the balls. When her mother had calmed down, she’d divorced the guy and done all she could to make it up to Chantel. But some scars didn’t go away.

  Ever.

  “You have nothing to fear from me, Colin. I’m not going to hurt Julie. I want to help her.”

  The last statement was completely, 100 percent true. The former, that Julie wouldn’t be hurt, she hoped would be true. She’d fight to the death to see criminals pay for their crimes. But she was neither jury nor judge. She was only the guy who got the thugs. It was up to others to take them to justice.

  “Julie told me that she talked to Leslie back then because your mother told her that Leslie was the one woman she’d trust above all else.”

  “I didn’t know that. But I know Mother trusted her.”

  Chantel was pretty much certain that the woman was lying to police. And medical personnel. And, by doing so, putting her and her son’s lives at risk.

  “You still think she’s trustworthy?”

  His shrug was frustratingly noncommittal. He sipped his bourbon and kept both hands around the glass.

  She’d thought he was coming over for sex.

  Off her mark again.

  It wasn’t that she’d been looking forward to another night of incredibly mind-blowing sex, but...she’d been curious to know if something like that could happen twice.

  Had definitely been willing to find out.

  But she was there for the job. Of course.

  Maybe she was lucky he was there at all.

  “You don’t trust Leslie?” she pressed. Leslie Morrison was the reason she’d met Colin Fairbanks. She and Julie were the reason she was still there.

  “I feel comfortable that Leslie has Julie’s best interests at heart.”

  But... “You don’t trust her?”

  He looked at her then. “I don’t trust anyone,” he said. “Not even myself sometimes.” His look grew more direct.

  “You don’t trust yourself with me, do you?”

  “I’m uncomfortable with how fast things are growing between us.”

  She couldn’t have him backing off. “We can slow down if you need to.” Just as soon as he gave her definitive proof that Leslie Morrison was being abused.

  And preferably after he made love with her one more time...

  No. No! No! No!

  They’d had sex. Out-of-this-world, best-there-ever-was sex. Love had had nothing to do with it...

  “That’s just it,” he said, smiling for the first time since he’d come into the room that night. “I don’t want to slow down. I want to speed up. Have you naked with me between your legs. Now. For the rest of tonight. And whatever tomorrows you have to give me.”

  Okay, fate. If you’re still out there, I could use a little help here.

  “I want that, too.” The words must have been ordained. She had no idea why she uttered them. Or who uttered them. Harris? Johnson? Some power that had overtaken her senses?

  “And it doesn’t scare you?”

  “It’s completely unhinging me.” A 100 percent honest response. She took her first sip of whiskey. Just a sip. Because she was Johnson. Any other night, feeling as she did, she’d have downed the shot.

  Or gone straight for the ice cream instead.

  He moved so slightly that she couldn’t prove it was on purpose. His knee pressed against hers.

  “Why do you think Julie talked to Leslie?” she blurted.

  And then she was afraid she’d exposed herself, her true reason for being there, with the bald question.

  “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?” He was grinning now. “This need to know each other in the biblical sense and not let go. So much you’re forced to bring up the bad just to get your mind off how great last night was and how much all you want to do is repeat it. Again and again.”

  Okay. Fine. “It is a bit,” she allowed. He was going to know soon enough that he was having the effect on her that he thought he was.

  “I think Julie talked to Leslie, and still does, exactly for the reason she told you she does. Because she listened to our mother’s advice.”

  Not the answer she’d hoped for.

  “Before Julie told me who’d done this to her, she made a comment, something about sensing that I’d been through something similar. It just made me wonder...you know, if Leslie has been...hurt, as well...especially considering how she thought the commissioner’s wife was on the committee because of similarities between what happened to Julie in the past and someone else.”

  His eyebrows drew together, not with suspicion but with concern, as he shook his head. “You’re referring to the rumors,” he said. “The ones Julie alluded to in the car that first Saturday. About James hurting Leslie. Funny how, when something heinous happens, everyone is mum, but when someone points a finger at a good man, tongues can’t wag fast or often enough.”

  “You’re saying there’s no truth to them?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ve known James Morrison my entire life.”

  “You’ve known Smyth your whole life, too.”

  “Exactly.”

  He knew what the men were made of.

  “You trust him, then? You trust James Morrison?”

  He didn’t go that far. And any idea Chantel might have been forming that she was wrong—that Leslie Morrison wasn’t in any danger from her husband—disappeared.

  “Like I said. I don’t trust most people.”

  Colin had trust issues. She hadn’t needed his confirmation to figure out that much. Still, he was there. Needing to be with her.

&nbs
p; Giving her his trust—at least a modicum of it.

  And more than she could remember needing anything personally, for herself, she needed to be worthy of his trust.

  The feeling passed. As all of her personal feelings did. But the peculiar sense of hopelessness it left in its path didn’t sit well with her.

  Frustrated, Chantel took another sip of a drink she didn’t really want. She was getting nowhere and losing the grip that would allow her to maintain the facade indefinitely.

  “I actually didn’t hear any rumors about the Morrisons,” she told him. No, she’d gotten her information straight from the school counselor who’d told her about Ryder’s collage reading. About the boy’s timid denials of any wrongdoing in his home. From the emergency room medical reports, and from a sealed police record, denoting Morrison’s murder of his younger brother. A record she could never, ever talk about to Colin. “Only what you and Julie mentioned obliquely in the car on the way home from the library meeting last week.”

  “Good to know,” he said. “I’ve misjudged my fellow man.”

  “You didn’t answer my original question, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you know if Leslie was ever...hurt? Like Julie thought I was?”

  “Not for sure, I don’t.”

  “But you have your suspicions?”

  He hesitated. Emptied his glass. And then looked her in the eye. “I have my suspicions.”

  “You think she was raped?”

  “I don’t know any particulars. It’s just something Julie said one time when she was upset with me. Something about not understanding how it felt to be a woman who’d been overpowered. She implied that Leslie understood.”

  Chantel went cold. Adrenaline burned through her. “But you don’t think her husband would hurt her?”

  “Absolutely not. If anything, I think James does all he can to protect her. Probably because he knows she’s more fragile than some. Like Julie.”

  Thoughts ran through her mind in beat with myriad feelings. Fear for the women unknowingly in her care. For any woman who, like her younger self, suffered at the hand of someone physically stronger. Chantel was the lucky one. She’d known how to fight back.

  But she couldn’t think about all that right now. She had to stay on track, stay in character. She needed to be Colin’s girlfriend so that she could get her job done.

  “What about you?” His look had turned tender. “Was my sister right in sensing that you’ve also been hurt?”

  His words swamped her with a sudden need to have him protect her. Like he protected Julie. And thought James was protecting Leslie...

  No. No! No! No!

  “Not like that, I wasn’t,” she said softly, feeling, oddly, like she was turning traitor on herself. Her younger self. “But I lost my best friend to violence.”

  She hadn’t meant to give him so much.

  Or to lose so much of herself when he said, “Come here,” so softly and pulled her down to the couch, to cradle her in his arms as though he really could protect her better than she could protect herself.

  What scared her most was that for just a few minutes she wanted to let him try.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  HE SPENT THE night with her. Woke up in her arms. And wanted to stay there. Conscious of how she’d been alarmed when he’d woken her the morning before, he just lay there, holding her.

  Blond hair splayed across his arm. One of her legs was in between his. Her hand was resting on his thigh.

  They were rougher than he’d expected, those hands of hers. He’d noticed the first time he’d held them. And again, each time she’d run them over his skin. They were strong, too. Sometime during the night, in between making love and dozing, he’d been aware of her hands on his shoulders, massaging him so well he’d awoken with delicious chills.

  Not surprising, that strength. She was a writer who spent her days pounding keys. And the roughness—he liked that, too. Not only for the slightly raspy feel of her dragging them down his skin, but because of what those hands told him about her. She wasn’t afraid to chip in and help out. To use her hands for more than adornment. Maybe she tended flowers. Or loved to cook and had her hands in water a lot.

  Could be they were chafed from living in the cold of upstate New York? Though he knew from his mother and sister that lotion would take care of that malady.

  She might paint. Julie, who was a writer, did. She grumbled about the turpentine taking a toll on her skin.

  It could also be chocolate. He’d asked her to order some for the night before, though he hadn’t realized until after their drink at the bar and a few minutes on the couch that she actually had done so. Fondue. To make up for the dessert they’d missed the night they’d gone out to dinner.

  Her attachment to that night—their first official date, wanting to finish it—touched him. They’d reheated the chocolate in the microwave on the counter behind the bar.

  And the things those fingers had done to his body with that chocolate—once it had cooled just enough for her to dip them...

  Glancing from her hand to her mouth, remembering how her tongue had followed along behind her finger, licking and sucking the chocolate trail, he knew two things at once.

  He was ready to make love to her again.

  And she was awake. Watching him.

  When their gazes met, her hand slid from his thigh to the hardness she had to have felt against her leg. Not the least bit embarrassed, Colin waited to see what she would do next.

  Normally in charge of any physical relations he’d participated in, he wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to lie there, unmoving, but driven by curiosity and some unknown need to let her do whatever she wanted to do, he kept his hands still.

  She stroked him. Slowly, softly, at first—and then with more vigor. He didn’t want this to be over so quickly. He wanted more of her. To share it with her. Reaching out a hand to stop her, he groaned instead.

  He was too late.

  * * *

  IT WAS ALMOST eight the next time Chantel awoke. Colin had not only brought her to incredible climax with his hands, but he’d been ready to slip inside her by the time she’d finished and brought her to a second orgasm almost immediately.

  She’d never known anyone like him. Reacted to anyone the way she reacted to him. She was in trouble. And after the night they’d just spent, the talking and making love, she couldn’t keep lying to herself.

  Crazy as it sounded, she was falling for Colin Fairbanks. Maybe even like Max fell for his Meri. In a way that was stronger than self.

  Leave it up to her to do so in a way that would never bring her happiness. Colin would throw her out of his life as fast and as far as he could if he ever found out about her subterfuge. And if he didn’t...she sure as hell couldn’t pretend to be Johnson for the rest of her life. More than a night or two at the Landau would bankrupt her.

  Even if, by some chance, he still wanted her around after he knew she’d broken his trust, they weren’t going to work. He was an alpha male, a protector who, according to him, failed his little sister. And she was a cop.

  And if that wasn’t enough against her—if Chantel hadn’t been so depressed she’d have chuckled to herself—she and Colin were nowhere near in the same league. She actually preferred her plain little apartment to the luxury of this room. Would much rather be in sweats and no makeup with her hair in a ponytail, in front of the TV with her feet on the coffee table, than walking on marble floors and sipping wine.

  There was no future for them.

  Knowing that didn’t ease the ache in her heart that morning.

  He stirred. They were both going to have to go. He had whatever it was rich rainmakers did on Sundays to tend to. And she was on shift at noon.

  Still, she
didn’t lift her head from his chest. Or move her hands from where she’d fallen asleep holding him. His fingers threaded through her hair. Light little caresses, befitting of Chantel Johnson.

  “I don’t want to let you go.” Her heart cried out to him. In Johnson’s cultured voice.

  “There’s no need to rush on my account,” he rumbled against her ear. “I have brunch at eleven with a couple of investors brokering a deal, but it’s local so I’ve got some time.”

  “I just...” She broke off, not knowing what to do. She rested her chin on her hands on top of his chest. “Promise me something...” She tried for low and sultry and sexy, when what she wanted to do was blurt out her fears and demand that he not hurt her any more than he had to. To tell him that he could trust her. Always. Except that she wasn’t who she said she was.

  She couldn’t tell him. He was friends with Morrison and did not believe the man would ever hurt his wife. And she couldn’t tell him what she knew about the man’s past. Or his wife’s medical records.

  And he was a protector. He’d never be okay with his woman taking on the most powerful men on the Santa Raquel California coast. Most particularly after he’d seen what those men had done to his baby sister.

  He’d never understand...

  “What do you want me to promise you?” His gaze was half-lidded, and she had a feeling that while she was lying there angsting her heart out, he’d been dozing on and off.

  “That if there ever comes a time when you’re unsure about me, you give me the benefit of the doubt.” She chose the words carefully. She knew it was dangerous to say them, to even hint at the possibility that there might come a time when he couldn’t trust her, but she couldn’t hold them back.

  She was in over her head.

  But she couldn’t stop now. Not when she was getting somewhere. Getting close. Not when she didn’t trust her own department to take the Smyth information and run with it. Not when she didn’t know who she couldn’t trust.

  His hand stilled. “That sounds ominous.”

  Finally words came to her. “You don’t trust people, Colin. You’ve said so, several times.” Several times the night before, alone. “It’s a bit daunting, to...care so much so quickly. Only to have you add in the fact that the guy you’re suddenly besotted with isn’t big on trusting, and you start to see the potential for disaster.” She smiled to soften the words. To give them a Johnson-like quality.