“Well, yes, sure, but—”
She glossed right over the last word. “So the situation—and the way you react—is not going to be any different from what it would be if we get to know each other in the biblical sense or not.”
Alex gave up trying to remove her arms from his neck. It just wasn’t in him to fight his own feelings and her. Not when he wanted her so badly.
“You’re wasted as a cop, you know that, right?” Alex asked her. “You should be in the DA’s office, having your way with words.”
But Valri shook her head, disagreeing with his assessment. “I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.” She moved in even closer to him. “Now, stop talking and kiss me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he murmured.
Valri pulled back her head just for a moment. “You call me ‘ma’am’ again,” she warned, “and your mouth’ll be too bruised to kiss anything.”
He wasn’t quite sure if she was serious or kidding. He was about to say as much when Valri suddenly rose up on her toes and very effectively sealed her mouth to his.
Sealed his fate as well because his immediate future was suddenly clear as crystal.
He abandoned the safeguards he’d so carefully constructed around his feelings, barriers that were supposed to keep him safe from accidentally getting involved with a woman who was definitely not one-night-stand material. He had immediately sensed that about Valri the moment he’d met her.
Valri was a forever type of woman, the kind to take home to mother—if he had a mother to take her to. The kind who required settling down, drawing up blueprints for a tidy, two-story home that would house not just the two of them but two point five children and a mixed-breed dog, as well.
In short, everything he’d been running from all his adult life, not because he didn’t want it, but because he did. It would be wrong to get involved with that type of woman because he had nothing to give in return. Instability had been the main structure of his life, and a woman like Valri needed and deserved stability.
This was wrong, a little voice somewhere far in his soul was faintly shouting.
All wrong.
She had a pedigree, and he came from a family of con artists and art forgers. The two were hopelessly incompatible.
There were so many, so very many arguments for this not to be happening between them. And only one small argument for it taking place.
Because he wanted her.
Wanted her with every fiber of his being, and one taste of her did not satisfy that intense craving.
Instead, what it did was increase the desire to have her a thousandfold.
He threw away restraint, as well as common sense, and gave himself up to the hurricane of emotions swirling through him.
If nothing else, he wanted her to always remember this—because he would.
Each kiss flowered into the next, increasing her desire as well as her pulse rate. She was on fire and feeling out of control. That was a new sensation for her. She’d always been the one who calculated everything down to the smallest detail. But this time, with this man, that control had been yanked out of her hands.
Suddenly, she’d been swept up, dragged along, like a swimmer caught in a riptide. The only difference was that there was no fear attached, only pleasure, pleasure of the kind that took her breath away and had her inwardly begging for more.
Passionate kisses blazed the way for possessive caresses that became only more so.
He owned her from the first touch.
A sense of ever-heightening urgency caused clothing to be all but ripped away, leaving a trail that went from the door to his bedroom. Once they had crossed that threshold, wrapped up—and around—each other with absolutely nothing in the way except for the flames of desire, the urgency flared almost sky-high.
He wanted to make love with her right at that instant, to feel that delicious sensation of conquest, growing excitement and then release. But at the same time, he didn’t want it to be over, didn’t want this wonderful, dizzying foreplay to end.
Hearing the small gasps and cries of ecstasy from Valri’s lips served to heighten his own ecstasy, his own pleasure.
If he could have planned his own eternity, his own version of heaven, it would have been this: to make love with this woman over and over again until the grains of sand ran out.
Alex had brought her up several times only to have her teetering on the brink, and then he’d retreat just enough to start all over again.
She was ready to explode, yearning for that final event, when everything lit up like the Fourth of July, showering stars all over her.
Her anticipation escalated.
Alex moved down her body, marking his path with quick, sensual hot kisses, causing her skin to dance and quiver of its own accord, further underscoring the fact that she had no control over her own body, her own reactions.
Her head swirling, she placed her hands on Alex’s shoulders and stopped him before he could cause yet another tidal wave of sensations to come pouring out. Urgent tugs finally brought him back up to her level, his eyes on hers.
“Now,” she whispered urgently. “Now.”
The smile curving his mouth told her he understood. Weaving his fingers through hers, his eyes never leaving her face, Alex drew himself up and then into her, sealing their bodies together to form one whole being.
And then the dance began, the tempo at first slow, then a little faster, and a little faster than that. The pace increased, each one faster than the last, not as fast as the next.
Continuing in an upward spiral until there was no higher level left.
He was consumed with her, skillfully bringing them both up to the level they deserved. The one they had worked so hard to achieve.
When he felt it about to reach the pinnacle, Alex sealed his mouth to hers, a silent symbol of unity, proving he was as much hers as she was his.
The eruption enveloped them both and they clung to it for as long as they could, unwilling to descend to earth.
But the descent was inevitable.
When it was over and the euphoria was breaking up into tiny, tiny pieces and receding into the mist, he still cradled Valri in his arms, wishing for a better world than the one they were currently occupying.
And then, out of the blue, he laughed softly to himself. “I guess this wasn’t exactly what you expected when I asked you to come in for a root beer.”
A smile was flirting with her lips as she propped herself up on her elbow to look at him.
“Who says?” she challenged. “This is exactly what I thought was going to happen when I said yes and pretended to take you up on that offer.”
“You didn’t want root beer?”
“Not especially.”
The warmth in his eyes had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with her. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re devious?”
“You’d be the first,” Valri answered innocently.
Sure he was, Alex thought, amused. “But I’ll bet I won’t be the last.”
“I’ll take that bet,” she told him. “We’ll talk terms later. Much later. Because I’ve got things for you to do at the moment.”
If he planned to ask “What?” Alex never got the chance. She had better things to do with his mouth than just have him talk.
And she showed him.
Chapter 16
She brought out the best in him.
It was the first thought that whispered across his brain as Alex began to slowly surface above the layers of sleep that had been wrapped around him. While making love with a woman was a vastly pleasurable undertaking, in his experience, he rarely did an encore. Moreover, to the best of his recollection, making love three times in the space of one night had never happened before.
But then, Va
lri had happened and it seemed as if all the rules, all the givens suddenly changed.
Just thinking about last night aroused him. Eyes still closed, savoring the warm memories, Alex reached for her.
And came up with more blanket, but no Valri.
She wasn’t there.
He bolted upright, fully awake now, and his eyes flew open. Her side of the bed was really empty.
When had she left? And, more important than that, why?
Alex was about to throw on his clothes in order to go search for her when he noticed that he wasn’t the only one in the room. His brain still fuzzy, it took him a prolonged moment before he could actually focus.
He was staring at Valri’s back.
She hadn’t left, she’d just left his bed.
Valri was wearing one of his T-shirts. Now, why did that seem so incredibly sexy to him? But it did. Especially when he began thinking about the very real possibility that she had nothing on underneath the T-shirt.
She was seated at the small desk in the corner, and from what he could ascertain, Valri was typing something on his computer.
“You’re up,” she said without turning around.
Surprised, since he hadn’t made any noise he was aware of, he began to ask, “How did you...?”
“I can see your reflection on the monitor,” she told him, then added, “I made coffee.”
That didn’t interest him nearly half as much as what she was currently doing. “Are you on the computer?” he asked in disbelief.
He heard her laugh in response. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
Obviously, for her it was business as usual. Was she that addicted to the internet? What was she checking? And, now that he came to think of it, how?
“But my computer is password protected,” he protested.
Valri looked over her shoulder at him and grinned. The expression on her face told him that it would have taken more than just a simple password to lock her out.
“It was,” she acknowledged. Her tone indicated that she was willing to leave it at that.
She might, but he wasn’t. “You hacked into my computer?”
“Afraid so,” she confessed. “I needed to follow up a hunch I just had and I left my own laptop at home. I thought I’d be finished before you woke up. Sorry,” she apologized. But she didn’t stop typing.
Alex leaned over the side of his bed and scooped up a pair of jeans that he’d forgotten about and left on the floor two nights ago.
Sliding the jeans on, he got up and walked up behind his partner. “You had a ‘hunch’ at—” he paused to look at his watch, the only thing he’d had on last night when he’d made love with her “—six thirty in the morning?”
Again she grinned. “My hunch had no idea what time it was,” Valri quipped.
He found the whole idea slightly suspect. “What are you doing?” he asked. Just what had been so important it had her abandoning bed at this hour? “Updating your Facebook page?”
And then something else occurred to him, something that was closer to home, given the background she’d mentioned to him. “Don’t tell me you’re playing video games.”
“No and no to both your questions,” Valri answered. “I enjoy video games and I have to admit, there is a certain rush that comes when you’re playing in competitions, but I can walk away anytime. I play the game, the game doesn’t play me,” she assured him. “I’m not addicted to video games—the way some people are.”
“Are you talking about—?” He didn’t get a chance to finish his question.
“Uh-huh. Bigelow,” she confirmed. “He’s evolved into a pretty savvy hacker, but deep down inside that hacker lives the soul of a gamer.” Her fingers swept across the keyboard swiftly as she talked. “And, like any true addict, Bigelow can only stay away for so long before he picks up another controller and jumps into another competition.”
He watched screen after screen go by at almost a dizzying speed. Was she searching for Bigelow this way, looking for the multiplayer game he had joined?
“Didn’t you tell me that at any given hour, there were a lot of online tournaments going on at the same time?” he asked.
Valri remained focused on the screens that were whizzing by. “Yup, that was me. That’s what I said,” she agreed.
Fascinated by the speed with which she was typing, Alex dragged over the other chair he had in his bedroom. Some of the clothes that had resided on the back of it fell off as he parked it next to the desk. Straddling the chair, he continued to watch what she was doing. From where he sat, it seemed like a rather hopeless endeavor.
“Then isn’t looking for Bigelow like this a little like looking for—”
“A needle in the haystack?” she supplied without looking away from the screen. “Yes, it is.”
If it was an exercise in futility, he had a feeling she wouldn’t have undertaken it, so he made no further comment.
Next to the computer he saw that Valri had parked one of his coffee mugs. The mug was empty. From the faint stain he saw inside, he knew it hadn’t been that way for long.
“Want a refill on the coffee?” he offered.
She spared him a grateful glance. “That would be great.”
Picking up the mug, Alex made his way into the kitchen. He smelled it a moment before he saw it. Valri had brewed an entire pot of coffee, most of which was still on the coffeemaker. After refilling her mug, he took one for himself.
Alex was carrying a mug in each hand as he walked back to the bedroom. He had almost made it back when he heard Valri declare a very enthusiastic and exceedingly pleased “Gotcha!”
Yes, you do, Alex thought in total and absolute wonder. She had him. And I don’t even know how you did it. All I know is that if I tried to fight this, it would easily qualify me to be number one on the list of dumbest human beings.
“You know, bragging isn’t very ladylike,” he told Valri as he crossed the threshold into the room. He handed his partner her mug and then took a sip of his own jet-black coffee.
“Right now, I don’t care,” she answered in all honesty. “I feel like crowing, which isn’t very ladylike, either,” she acknowledged philosophically. Exceptionally pleased with herself, Valri leaned back in the faux leather swivel chair, holding the mug of steaming coffee with both hands. She stared at the screen, a very satisfied look on her face. “I got him, Alex. I got the SOB. He just couldn’t keep away.”
“Oh.” He looked over her shoulder at the screen as the truth dawned on him for the first time. “You’re talking about Bigelow.”
“Well, yeah, of course I’m talking about Bigelow. Who did you think I was talking about?” The moment the question was out of her mouth, she realized the answer. Turning her chair so that she could face him, Valri smiled warmly. “I don’t have to go on the internet in order to find you,” she pointed out. “You’re right here, bigger than life,” she murmured just before she turned back to the computer monitor.
“So Bigelow is online right now?” he asked. He looked at the screen again, but he realized that it didn’t matter how long he stared at it, he wouldn’t see what she saw.
“That’s where he is,” she assured Alex.
“But that still doesn’t tell us where he physically is. He’s clever enough to have hidden his tracks,” he pointed out.
Alex was standing behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder as he stared at some sort of a strange scenario, a medieval-looking world of intricate castles populated by perfect specimens of the ideal men and women engaged in battles using futuristic weapons.
“Wanna bet?” Valri paused what she was doing to look at him for a moment. “Do you even know what I do?” she asked.
His smile was extremely sexy as he pretended to think. “If memory serves, you have the power to up my stamin
a to levels I didn’t know that I was capable of reaching.”
Valri struggled not to laugh. “I meant on the computer.”
That part he was already well aware of. “You make that damn thing talk to you the way it doesn’t to most people—certainly not me.”
“Close enough,” she accepted. He was describing it as best he could, considering he was a layman. “What I just did, after following it to various places all over the world, was track down his IP address.”
He’d heard the term a number of times and never really stopped to find out exactly what that meant or entailed. He asked now. “And that is...?”
“A good thing,” she concluded, not wanting to confuse him with way too many details. “Bigelow is clever and took some heavy-duty precautions, bouncing his signal all over the place, but eventually it led to this address,” she told Alex, typing said address on the keyboard so that it could be located on a map of the region.
“You see,” she continued, “Bigelow thinks he’s too smart to be caught and that’s his tragic flaw, his hubris.” When she caught the bemused look on her partner’s face, Valri told him, “I minored in English lit. Some of it stuck.”
“Anything you say,” Alex replied, willing to accept whatever she told him. He affectionately kissed the top of her head. Then he got a pen off the desk and wrote down the address he saw on his palm since there was no paper around. “I’ll call this in and request backup to meet us there.”
“Let me see if anyone owns the building,” she said, typing quickly again. In less than two minutes, she had gotten into public records to see if the property had been bought by anyone, or if it had just been completely abandoned, allowing transients and vermin to overrun the building.
“How do you do that?” he marveled, looking over her shoulder.
“Practice. Well, what do you know,” she said under her breath.
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