He thrust into her harder, deeper, and her nails sank into his butt. Sucking in a sharp breath, he slammed into her, snaked his arms around her, and rolled them over.
She sprawled across his chest and a grin crooked his mouth at the wide eyes that stared down at him, and the startled look that flashed across her face. “If ever there was a woman built to be on top, it’s you.” He adjusted her legs on either side of his hips, appreciating their sleekness beneath his own rough-skinned hands. Then, gripping her taut thighs, he thrust up into her. “Ride me.”
He watched heat spread across her cheeks at his command, but she pushed herself up until she was sitting astride him, raised her hips experimentally, then slid back down his rigid sex. She repeated the motion. A look of startled pleasure scudded across her eyes. Rising and falling upon the erection wedged firmly up inside her, she raised languorous arms over her head, folded them, elbows high, and rested a cheek against one bicep. Her eyes slid closed.
And she smiled, licking her lips.
Sam’s penis jerked. “Oh, man, I think I’ve created a monster.” His hands reached for her breasts, and his hips came up off the bed. She slapped down on him in perfect rythmn. He plucked at her nipples, gritting his teeth against the need to drive like a pile driver run amok to his own completion. “You really like it up there, don’tcha?”
“Sam?” Her head fell back and she rose up his length a little faster, thrust down a little harder. Reaching behind her, she braced her hands on his legs. “Oh, God, Sam? I’m going to…uh! Oh, God, I want to…”
“Come,” he growled, and delved a thumb into the wet tangle of curls above where they were joined. Locating her magic button, he pressed and felt an unholy grin split his face when her low moan spiraled several octaves higher. “That’s it, darlin’, let it go. I want to hear you. I want to see ya come for me.”
His gaze was firmly on her face when all that screaming, throbbing sensation inside her suddenly coalesced, grew hotter, then hotter yet, and then blew sky-high like the grande finale at a Pyrotechnics of America convention. Jerking convulsively as wave after wave of ecstasy hit her, she threw back her head and groaned at the top of her voice.
Hearing her, seeing her, feeling her clamp down around him again and again with each contraction, Sam lost it. He started to slip his thumb free of its creamy nest, but Catherine grabbed his wrist to hold it in place and started contracting crazily around him all over again.
His breath left his lungs in an explosive, “Hah!” and he grabbed for her bottom with his free hand and gripped it while his hips shot up off the mattress. He slammed into her once, twice, three times, then impaled her with one final thrust that lifted her high, and staring up at her flushed cheeks, slumberous green eyes, and tumbled red hair, came in scalding pulsations. His hips jerked as he came and came with bone-rattling satisfaction, and despite the teeth he kept gritted against it, a name rumbled in his chest, surged up his throat, and roared its way past his unlocked teeth.
“Catherine!”
He collapsed back onto the mattress, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tightly when she slumped down atop him. Rubbing his chin against the top of her head, he stared up at the ceiling.
Uneasiness warred with a simpleminded sort of happiness and gradually won out. As much as he longed to tell himself differently, he knew who he had in his arms. Knew it beyond a doubt this time.
The chorus-girl tattoo might have stacked up against all the other reasons he’d already trotted out for reality not fitting her appearance. But it rumbled into dust against her blushes, tight, untried body, and undisguised expressions of wonder. She was Catherine MacPherson. Respectable teacher of the deaf.
He might not know how she’d ended up with the same kiss-my-ass tattoo as her twin sister. But he knew this: he’d really fucked up this time, and he didn’t mean the position he’d assumed while violatiing that sweet, sweet body.
He’d gone and snatched the wrong friggin’ sister.
19
FROM A PRONE position on the bed, Bobby watched Kaylee prowl the room. When the silence grew so oppressive he couldn’t stand it any longer, he demanded plaintively, “Aren’t you ever gonna talk to me again?”
She gave him a scathing look and he repeated for what felt like the sixth or seventh time, “Baby, I’m sorry I didn’t know who you were, okay? But it’s not like it lasted all that long, and ya gotta cut me some slack, here. I didn’t plan to lose my memory, and I sure as hell didn’t get my head bashed in just to ruin your day.”
She continued to ignore him, striding from the window where she stopped only long enough to drum her fingers against the sill and pout out at the rainy morning, to the table and two chairs in the corner, to the bathroom, and back again. Bobby watched, feeling his tension mount. His head throbbed savagely, he felt embarrassingly feeble all over, and still he desired her a little bit more with every long-legged stride she took. Worse, he wanted her approval, and that had the effect of making him downright irritable.
The neediness of his feelings aside, he knew damn good and well that the odds were great he wasn’t going to get her approval anytime soon. All that unexpressed ire, which practically stood her red hair on end, made that evident.
The fact that she wouldn’t accept his apology, however, really began to grate on his nerves. “Dammit, Kaylee,” he burst out after watching her complete yet another circuit. “I had a concussion! Hell, I probably still have a concussion. And it wasn’t only you I forgot.”
At least he got her attention. Eyes flashing, mouth sulky, Kaylee whirled to face him. “You don’t,” she snapped.
He blinked at her in befuddlement. “I don’t what?”
“Still have a concussion.”
“Yeah?” Belligerence rose at her unequivocal tone. “And how the hell would you know? My head’s still pounding somethin’ miserable.”
“Remember that doctor at the clinic? He told me what to look for, and your symptoms went away about midnight.”
He barely remembered the doctor or the clinic. He recalled coming to, colder than death except where his back touched a patch of hot concrete and where his forearm was burrowed to the wrist between the most luscious set of tits he’d ever seen in his life. He remembered his hand, emerging from said tits, being clutched by a gorgeous redhead who’d hung over him in concern.
And he sure as hell recalled the way she’d dropped it like a disease-infested sack of garbage when he’d asked if he knew her.
The drive through the countryside to the clinic remained a blur, though, as did the examination that followed. He thought there’d been another drive after that, but the details were gone. He did know the redhead had woken him up periodically, and that it was late when she’d finally left him to sleep in peace.
He’d awakened this morning to find most of his memory restored and himself in Kaylee’s arms. But when he’d given her a sleepy smile and greeted her with his lazy, familiar, “Hey, baby,” she’d flown off the bed like a scalded cat. And she’d been silently, solidly furious ever since. When he’d been the one to have his head caved in for reasons he couldn’t even fully recall.
Go figure.
“Here.” Her scarlet-tipped fingers were suddenly thrust beneath his nose. “Take these.”
He put a hand out in automatic response and had three aspirin dropped into his palm.
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” she said coolly, and turned and left the room.
Kaylee let the water run, and with her hands braced on the countertop, stared blindly at her reflection in the mirror while she fought to get herself under control. Bobby was right. She had to cut him some slack.
But, Jaysus, it was a hard, hard thing to do when her emotions kept running amok the way they’d been doing for the past twenty-plus hours.
Never in her life had she been petrified like that for someone else. She’d been frightened for herself plenty of times and scared of situations in general, but she’d never experienced the gut-wrenching terror
that came of fearing for another person’s safety.
Yesterday, Bobby had regained consciousness just about the time it had begun to dawn on her that her feelings for him were serious. The last thing she’d been in any frame of mind to discover was that, while for the first time in her life she was quite likely in love, he didn’t even know who the hell she was.
She’d gotten him to a clinic, and that had been a nightmare all its own. It had taken the doctor and nurse what seemed like forever before they’d stablized his body temperature and felt it was safe to release him, and then it had been with a list of instructions as long as her arm. She’d never dealt with that sort of responsibility for herself, let alone somebody else.
She’d been terrified to the bone all night long, certain she would screw up somehow and do something to send him spinning down into an irreversible coma. Then, when he’d awakened this morning as if nothing out of the ordinary had gone before, fear had transformed into anger.
She felt like she was coming unglued.
Much as she’d adore to stay pissed at him, however, the fault truly couldn’t be laid at Bobby’s door. The back of his head still sported a nasty bump, for God’s sake, whose dimension had only shrunk somewhat during the night. Damn. She supposed she really had no choice but to get over it.
But she didn’t have to like it.
She filled a glass with water and turned off the faucet. Carrying it back to the room, she sat down on the side of the bed and handed it to him. “Just how much do you remember about yesterday?”
Bobby’s eyebrows furrowed. “I knew who you were as soon as I woke up this morning. But as far as the rest of it goes, I get bits and pieces and flashes of stuff, and it’s like seeing them through a piece of cheesecloth.”
“Can you lay out for me what you do remember?”
He concentrated. “Okay. I remember going into the café to make arrangements to meet with your sis…” Stricken blue eyes flashed up to meet her gaze. “Ah, shit, baby, your sister. I can’t believe I forgot all about her. I let her get taken away, didn’t I?” He abruptly shoved himself up on an elbow and Kaylee watched as the color drained right out of his face. “Chains! I was signing the stuff you taught me to Catherine when Chains showed up.” He swore roundly and rubbed at his head. “That son of a bitch. He’s the one who hit me. He didn’t get her, too, did he?”
Kaylee hugged herself. “I don’t know. I didn’t hear any fuss over a missing woman while I was looking for you in Arabesque, but as far as anything that’s happened since then…” She shrugged helplessly. Then she added with studied casualness, “I guess he probably thought she was me, huh?” She wanted desperately to hear otherwise.
Her wish was not fulfilled. “Yeah.” Events were starting to unfold more clearly in Bobby’s mind obviously. “He had no reason to believe otherwise. And, baby, he’s here under orders from Sanchez.”
Kaylee moaned at the mess she’d made of everything. But when Bobby tried to sit up, she pressed her hands against his chest to stay him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To get your sister back for you.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, don’t be an ass!” Oh, good, Kaylee, attack the ego. That’s bound to make him receptive to good sense. “That is, that’s just real sweet of you and all, but you’re in no condition—” No, no, no, no, NO! What is it with you, girl? You knew how to handle men better when you were twelve. “Uh, what I mean to say is, the doctor said you have to stay quiet for a couple of days. He said it was absolutely—what was that word he used?—oh yeah, imperative.”
Bobby rolled out from under her hands toward the other side of the bed. “Screw imperative,” he suggested. “And screw the doctor, too.”
Kaylee had had a truly awful night. Temper igniting, she knocked him flat on his back, and it was a measure of how much had been taken out of him that she could so easily do so. “Screw them? Screw them?” Climbing on top of him, she straddled his stomach to glare down into his face. “Does that apply to me, too?” Slapping her hands down on his shoulders, she leaned her weight against them to keep him pinned in place. “Do you have any idea how scared I was, Bobby? It must have been a hundred flippin’ degrees in that car, but you were wrapped to the teeth in a blanket, freezing to death! The doctor said we’d be much better off in a city that was 150 miles away in case you needed emergency medical treatment, so I bundled you back in the car and drove like some demented stock-car racer to this cow-town Gotham City. But he’d also said not to let you sleep for more than a half hour at a time, so I had to keep stopping to wake you up and check your pupil reactions, and every damn time you smiled that stupid, charming smile of yours and asked me who I was. Oh, and yes, you let me know how very much you admired my t…tits.”
Her hands gripped his shoulders and gave them what would have been a fierce shake had he not been so firmly anchored to the bed by her weight. She looked him dead in his handsome blue eyes.
“Well, let me clue you in on something, bud—I’ve had it up to my eyeballs, and I’m not taking any more shit off of you. I don’t have the first idea how to take care of myself, but somehow I managed to take care of you anyway, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you run around acting out some comic-book macho fantasy and undoing all my hard work. As long as I have breath in my body, that ain’t gonna happen, so you can just live with it, buster—and your male ego be d…damned!”
She didn’t realize she was crying until he reached up and brushed the tears from her cheeks with his fingertips. Then he gave her inner elbows a poke to make her arms bend and pulled her down on top of him, wrapping her up in his brawny embrace. “Shh,” he crooned, tucking her head into the crook of his neck and anchoring it there with his chin in her hair. She flung her arms around his neck, and he stroked her everywhere his hands could reach. “Shh, shh, shh, now. It’s okay, baby. You did real good, and I’ll do whatever you say.”
“I was so scared, Bobby.”
“I know, baby, I know.” He tipped his chin down. “But you handled it. You did what had to be done. Just like your sister would’ve.”
She tilted her head back to look up at him. “I’ve screwed up so bad. I’ve gotta find Cat and get her out of this mess.”
“You called Scott yet?”
“No. No! I forgot about him.” She struggled free of his arms. “I’ll do that right now.”
She hung up the phone fifteen minutes later. “They were put off another bus, but this time Scott doesn’t think it was because of anything Cat did. There’s a note in the Greyhound computer to pay their motel bill and not only to reissue their tickets but have the next bus through make a special stop to pick them up. It’s due in Laramie at five tonight.” She started tossing her few items of apparel not already packed into her suitcase.
Bobby struggled up on an elbow. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to meet the bus.”
“And you need your suitcase for that?” He didn’t like the uneasy sensation that crawled in the pit of his stomach.
Kaylee stopped what she was doing and looked at him. “If I can’t get her away from the bounty hunter any other way, I’ll have to turn myself over to him.”
“No!”
“What else can I do, Bobby? Let Catherine get killed in my place?”
“Yes! No. I don’t know. But we’ll think of something.”
“Unless we do in the next couple of hours, this is the way it’s gotta be. I have to leave in time to drive back to Laramie.”
“Where the hell are we now?”
“Cheyenne.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. Lowering them, he looked at her. “There’s got to be another way, baby.”
“I’m certainly open to suggestions. My mind’s a blank. The only clear thought I have is that I’m really and truly going to have to do this, and it scares me to death.” She rammed her fingers through her hair and blew out her breath. Meeting his eyes, she tried to explain. “All my life I let Cat take care of
business. I just accepted it as my due, as if that were the natural order of things. Well, last night I got a taste of what it must have felt like for her, and I had hours and hours to think about how young she was to be accountable for so much. No kid should ever have that kind of responsibility, but none of us—not me, not my dad or my mom—thought twice before unloading all our messes on her to clean up.”
Struggling to an upright position, Bobby moved to sit on the side of the bed. “I wish my damn head would quit pounding,” he muttered. “I can’t think straight.” Dropping the hands that rubbed at his temples, he looked over at her. “I had sorta thought maybe you and me would go to Vegas and start over. There’s all kinds of opportunities there for people like us. Lots of shows and revues for someone with your talent, and hell, I bet I could even work my way up to pit boss in some big casino.”
Kaylee stared at him in agony. She’d always thought of him as a good-time sort of guy, but here he was offering her so much more than she’d ever expected from him. She wanted badly to grab it with both hands.
And yet…
“I can’t let Catherine get hurt in my place, Bobby. I’ve walked the line between right and wrong more times than I care to think about, but that’s one thing I don’t think I could ever live with.”
Bobby didn’t know Catherine, so if it came down to choosing who had to take a fall, he quite frankly would rather it was her than Kaylee. He argued until he was hoarse, but nothing he said changed Kaylee’s mind, and he was forced to sit by and watch her trip out the door in her four-inch heels several hours later. His last sight before the door closed was of the swivel of her well-rounded, spandex-clad hips, the sun blazing in her hair, and her suitcase bouncing off the doorjamb to knock against her shapely calf. She gave it an impatient tug, and the door clicked closed.
He sagged back on the bed, cursing. He didn’t like this urge to do something stupidly noble, but it kept popping into his head. He had an awful feeling that he’d act on the damn thing, too, if he felt the least bit stronger. Because, even less did he like the sick churning he got in his gut wondering when he’d see her again.
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