How dare he be amused by her? Focused on that sardonic eyebrow, Catherine missed the signs of temper gathering in his eyes, the muscles bunching along his jaw. Her face hot, her heart pounding, she said wildly, “Both! You’re a repressed, sex-crazed hypocrite who wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with a willing woman—provided you could ever find one in the first place.”
Grabbing her upper arms in his big hands, he hauled her up onto her toes. Belligerence was written all over his face as he once again thust it close to hers. “Women happen to like me just fine,” he said through gritted teeth.
She shrugged, and the motion brought her breasts into fleeting contact with his chest. Her glance dropped swiftly to his sullen mouth before lifting once again to meet his furious gaze. Her heart was drumming so fast and so loud it was a wonder people weren’t pounding on the connecting walls of their room to demand they hold it down in there.
“So you say,” she managed to reply with spurious calm around the pulse pounding in her throat. This was surely the time to pull back and defuse the situation, but somehow all the words she knew she should suppress just boiled up out of her. “But we haven’t seen any evidence of that, have we, McKade? I bet the truth is that you hang out in seedy little strip joints, all hunkered down like a troll at the bar, drooling over the dancers while righteously belittling the morals of women who take their clothes off for a liv—”
Sam slammed his mouth over hers to shut her up—at least that’s what he told himself in his brief moment of lucidity. One second he stood there gripping her arms, his head pounding, pounding, pounding—with rage, with the excitement that was never far beneath the surface in his dealings with her, with a carnal curiosity so powerful he thought it might cripple him—and the next thing he knew he had her pressed up against the wall and his mouth was on hers, and he was kissing her—holy Christ, kissing her like a starving man presented with a sudden feast.
And she was kissing him back.
He felt her mouth open to him, and he groaned. Then he was inside her, and her taste was hot and sweet, and God, he wanted more. He insinuated his tongue deeper and his body closer, loving the lush weight of her breasts flattening beneath his chest, and the grip of her smooth, white arms as they wrapped around his neck and clung.
His hands thrust into her hair, dislodging pins. Slippery strands tangled around his fingers, and the scent of shampoo, fresh and seductive, was released into the air. Inhaling a sharp breath through his nostrils, he clamped her head between his hands. Then he raised his head fractionally, stared down at her slumberous eyes and reddened lips for a moment, and, changing the angle of his kiss, came at her from another direction to settle his mouth more firmly over hers. Her soft lips clung to his and her fingers came up to grip his head, as if afraid he’d pull back if she didn’t hold him in place. She tangled her tongue with his, and he groaned deep in his throat.
It could have been mere moments or hours later when he disengaged his hands from her hair and slid them slowly down her body until his fingertips brushed the high hem of her skirt. Curling his hands around the fabric, crushing it between his fingers, he tugged the stretchy material up her thighs and over her hips. Then it was bunched around her waist beneath the tail of his purloined shirt, and his fingers were snaking beneath the flimsy material of her panties. Suddenly he held a sweet, warm, volumptuously rounded cheek in each hand. He hauled her up until her legs were wrapped around his hips and that hot, damp, feminine place at the apex of her thighs was nudging his sex, cradling it as he rocked against her in a mindless fever.
Catherine moaned low in her throat and tightened her grip on Sam’s hair. His mouth on hers was demanding, his tongue aggressive, and his handling of her was nearly presumptuous, as if he had some God-given right of dominion over her body. She should have hated it, but instead it excited some subterranean demon she’d never dreamed was a part of her. She felt as if every move she’d made these past few days, every word spoken, or angle played with this man, had all been leading to this one fiery moment. All sensation, she felt as if she’d been thrust into a crucible of unrelenting heat that threatened to burn her alive. His mouth, his big hands on her bare skin, his body pressing hers up against the wall, all fed the flames. His erection was pressed hard between her legs, and his hips kept moving, moving, moving, in slow, tight, smooth oscillations that accessed nerve endings she’d never known she possessed. Dark sounds, disturbing in their neediness, reverberated in her throat as she clung to him, thrusting her pelvis against his as best she could given the tight confines between his body and the wall.
Without warning, Sam ripped his mouth free. Catherine uttered a small whimper of protest and tried to bring him back, but he kissed his way across her cheek to her ear. “God,” he whispered harshly. “You feel so good.” He sucked her earlobe into his mouth and gripped it lightly with his teeth, his ragged pants warming her captive earlobe and sending chills down the sensitive whorls of her ear.
And all the while his hips continued to move, driving her closer and closer to the edge.
“Sam?” Catherine tightened her grip on his head and tried to turn his mouth back to hers. He obliged her with one brief, hard foray against her mouth before pulling back and determinedly kissing his way down her throat. His fingers tightening on her bottom, he raised her up slightly and his mouth nuzzled hotly along the perimeters of the white oxford cloth collar.
“Take off my shirt, Kaylee,” he said hoarsely. “Ah, God, darlin’, take it off. I want to…”
Kaylee? Catherine blinked at him in confusion. With her cognitive processes fogged by arousal, the implication was slow to sink in, and she wanted to simply let it pass. Oh, God, just this one time, and she’d never ask for anything again. She was poised on the very cusp of an orgasm, and had no desire to rock the boat and give it all up.
She moved against him harder, only to discover that, even with the promise of satisfaction such as she’d never known in the offing, she couldn’t keep quiet. “Catherine,” she whispered hoarsely. “My name is Catherine.” Say it, Sam. Please, please, just say it one time.
For a second, he didn’t respond. His mouth continued to play over her throat, his hips continued to undulate against her. Then suddenly he stilled. Lifting his head, he stared down into her face for a moment. Then his forehead hit the wall next to her with an audible thunk.
“Don’t do this.” His voice was as strained as hers as he ground his frontal lobe back and forth against the rough plaster of the wall. His head turned until his lips were against her ear. “Damn you, Kaylee,” he said hoarsely, “don’t. Can’t you just allow this, at least, to be free of your lies?”
Cold reality doused all the hot sensations that thundered in her every pulse point, and it probably should have caused her to whisper thanks for her narrow escape. At the moment, however, gratitude was simply beyond her. Still stunned that she should experience such raging sensations in the first place, and fearing they were only temporarily banked, she simply rested her head against the wall and concentrated on drawing deep, calming breaths. She had to get herself together.
Sam raised his head and stared down at her. Her lips were swollen and looked bruised by the savagery of his kisses. The green of her irises was nearly swallowed by the dilation of her pupils. But her gaze, as it clashed with his, was unrepentant, and he knew damn well she wasn’t about to recant her claim. He’d never met anybody so damn stubborn in his life.
It infuriated him. “I can make you want it,” he said with harsh huskiness, and knew in his gut it was true. She had the look of a woman on the very edge. It wouldn’t take much to push her over, and he wasn’t feeling particularly charitable. “I can make you beg for it, Red, and it won’t matter then what name I call you.” Furious in an agony of frustrated arousal, he gripped her butt and moved his hips once, twice, watching with grim satisfaction as her eyes lost focus and her lids started to drift closed. Color suffused her cheeks and a faint, needy moan sounded deep in her throa
t. She tilted her pelvis forward.
Then she jerked it back again, and her arms dropped to her sides, her feet slid to the floor. Slowly, her lashes lifted. Eyes still dilated, still heavy-lidded and drowsy with sexual need, they nevertheless met his gaze with stubborn determination. “My name is Catherine,” she said huskily. She licked her lips. “Say it.” It was part command, part plea. “Please? Just call me Catherine one time, Sam. Just once, and I’ll give you anything—do anything—you want.”
Graphic visions flashed through his mind, and he was tempted…God, was he tempted. He could feel her nipples drilling into his chest through layers of fabric, was aware of how wet he’d gotten her, since more moisture had transferred from her panties to the fly of his jeans with each gyration of his hips. Hell, why even hesitate? All he had to do was open his mouth and say her sister’s name. Just say it one time, and then he could strip her down to the skin and satisfy every single impulse he’d stifled since the moment he’d first clapped eyes on her.
It was no skin off his teeth if she wanted to play the game this way, long as he got his.
Fingers sinking more firmly into the resilient flesh of her butt, he sucked in a deep breath as he bent his head to capitulate.
Then he snarled an obscentity and stepped back. “Pull down your skirt,” he commanded. Shoving his fingers through his hair, he turned away, silently cursing his outdated, inconvenient value system.
10
MADE EDGY AND uncomfortable by the vast, windswept high-desert country that stretched as far as the eye could see, Jimmy Chains stared glumly through the window of the phone booth while he waited for his call to connect. “Hey, boss, it’s me,” he said without enthusiasm when Hector Sanchez finally picked up the phone. “I’m here in Armpit, Wyoming, just like ya tole me.”
“Arabesque,” Hector corrected him.
Chains shrugged, unmindful that Sanchez had no way of seeing him through the line. “Coulda fooled me. This here’s gotta be one a the butt-ugliest places I ever seen in my life. ’Cept for maybe out on the ocean, which at least is blue, I ain’t never been in a place like this where a guy can stand in one spot and see forever.” An involuntary shudder moved through him. “It’s givin’ me the creeps, boss, there’s nuthin’ here but sagebrush. I miss the neighborhood.”
Sanchez ignored the complaint. “Have you made contact with Kaylee yet?”
“Huh-uh. Just been the one bus through here so far, and she weren’t on it.” Catching a glimpse of his reflection in the phone booth’s window, he fumbled a handkerchief out of his pocket and buffed up his chains. He felt marginally better when their reflection began to gleam. “Christ, it’s dusty here,” he bitched. “Seems like the wind don’t never stop blowin’.”
“Try to stay on track here,” Hector’s impatient voice commanded in his ear. “Have you checked out the territory yet, so you’ll have a handle on the situation when Kaylee does arrive?”
“Yeah. There’s a refrigeration shed behind the motel where I can stash the bounty hunter while I get her outta town. Once I do that, there’s like a bazillion acres to choose from for stashin’ her body.” He frowned at his dim reflection in the glass. “You sure I gotta kill her, boss? Couldn’t I just scare her? I always kinda liked—”
“I’ve explained this to you several times already,” Hector interrupted in the cold, terse voice that meant he was losing patience, and Chains straightened up smartly. “I’ll tell you again, but I want you to pay attention now, because I’m only going to say it once more. Are you listening?”
Chains nodded, his concentration focused on the need to absorb each word.
“Jimmy? Are you listening?”
“Yeah, boss.”
Enunciating slowly and concisely, Hector said, “Kaylee knows I paid you to take care of Alice. That means we’re in deep shit, Jimmy, real deep shit. The only thing that’s gonna get us out of it is if Kaylee’s not around to testify.”
“Hell, she prob’ly wouldn’t anyway.”
“You ready to stake your freedom on that?”
Jimmy Chains took his time thinking it over. Finally he said, “Nah, I guess not,” because the boss was usually right; he was a really smart guy.
“No, I didn’t think so. I figured you were too intelligent for that.”
Pride bloomed in Chain’s heart, and he preened, but then the boss’s next words completely ruined his temporary high.
“Did you exchange your silk suits for Western wear like I suggested?”
Chains looked with distaste at his plaid cotton shirt and stiff new unfaded Levi’s. Shit, the shirt wasn’t even properly pressed; it still had packing creases in its short sleeves. He reached up an exploratory finger to touch the only thing he liked about this get-up: the shiny silver and turquoise links that formed the band around his hard-brimmed new Stetson. “Yeah, I did,” he said morosely. “I look just like a fuckin’ native. Ain’t seen one yet knows how to dress worth a damn.”
“It’s necessary, Chains. You’ve got to blend into the scenery.”
“I s’pose.” Noticing the dust that marred the toe of his alligator loafer, he picked up his foot and rubbed it clean against the calf of his other leg. He admired the newly restored shine for a moment and the subtle pattern in his silk-blend socks. His sense of fashion restored, he raised his head again.
And found himself staring straight into a pair of soft brown eyes only inches away on the other side of the telephone booth’s dusty glass.
“Holy friggin’ shit!” His back hit the door of the phone booth in an involuntary attempt to put as much room as possible between himself and the creature staring in through the window.
“Chains?” Hector’s voice squawked from the receiver as it bounced off the metal shelf. The phone danced and swung on the end of its silver umbilical cord. “Chains! What the hell is going on?”
“Ho!” Jimmy Chains blew out a deep breath as he slowly straightened. He reeled in the dropped receiver. “It’s a horse.”
He eyed the animal warily. It had skittishly jerked its brown-spotted head back at Jimmy’s abrupt movement and the racket following it, but now extended its neck to thrust its face close to the glass again. “Jesus, he’s a big sonofabitch.” Forcing his mouth into a reasonable facsimile of a smile, he said softly, “Nice Spot. Good horse. Go home.” Then he saw the reins wrapped around the post next to the booth. “Ah, man, some asshole’s tied him up right next to me!”
“Will you forget the goddamn horse for a minute?”
“The only thing separatin’ me from this sucker is a real thin piece of glass, boss—he ain’t all that easy to forget.” Chains dragged his gaze away from the muscular brown-and-white beast to the unending vista beyond. “Christ, not only don’t they got no palm trees around here, they hardly got any kinda trees at all. It’s so brown. And if there’s a building over two stories tall in the entire fuckin’ state, I’ll eat my brand-new shitkicker’s hat. This place is depressing.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Hector said tersely, and Chains wondered what the hell his problem was—it wasn’t like the boss was the one stuck in this godforsaken hole. “You just do the job you’re there to do,” Hector commanded, “and the minute it’s done we’ll whip you right on home.”
“Back to paradise,” Chains agreed dreamily. “Where I can wear me some decent clothes again, and the only horses I have to look at are on the other side of the rails at Hialeah.”
“That’s right. All you have to do is take care of the Kaylee problem. Then you can catch the next flight back to the neighborhood.”
Jimmy Chains smiled to himself, visualizing it. Home. Deep blue skies, and palm trees that were both daytime green and night black cutouts against Miami’s bloodred sunsets. Neon lights and pastel buildings. Guys what knew how to dress snappy and Cuban girls with white, white teeth who strutted their stuff in bright summer dresses. The idea of getting back to the neighborhood flooded him with renewed confidence. “Piece a cake, boss,” he ass
ured Hector. “Ya might as well go on ahead and book that flight, ’cuz the job’s as good as done.”
Hector Sanchez carefully reseated the telephone receiver and sat back in his chair. He rubbed his aching temples. “Good as done,” he muttered to himself.
The idea of Jimmy Chains on the loose with no one to guide him, and worse—God help them all—a cocky Jimmy Chains, sent an icy shaft of pure dread straight to his bowels. Good as done. The words set up a nasty, echoing clamor in his mind.
Good as done, indeed. From Jimmy’s lips to God’s ear.
Or they were both going to be up the proverbial creek.
For the third time in less than half an hour, Bobby thrust the gas pedal to the floor and passed yet another Rocky Mountain motorist. The single terse word he bit out succinctly expressed his opinion.
Turning away from her indifferent perusal of the scenery whipping past outside the window, Kaylee settled back in the seat of their rental car and studied him. “You know, before I took this little road trip with you,” she commented mildly, “I never dreamed there were so many drivers in America named Dick.”
Bobby shot her a glance before he returned his attention to the road. He was chagrined but basically unrepentant about his loss of temper, which for some reason seemed to occur with increasing frequency the longer he was in her company. “Well, dammit, baby, where do all these idiots get their licenses anyhow—Farmer Brown’s School of Tractor Pulling? You don’t go fifty miles an hour on an interstate. People get killed that way.”
Kaylee quirked an eyebrow at him. “As opposed to what? Death by stroke? If you think that’s somehow a better way to go than in this Farmer-Brown pileup you seem to see in your head, I’m here to tell you…dead is dead.”
“Kaylee, honey, a guy only has to worry about having a stroke when he doesn’t vent his frustration. What I’m doing here is minimizing the risks in order to keep myself healthy.”
Baby, I'm Yours Page 11