She shook her head, tousling her hair around her bare shoulders, and corrected him. “He kicked me.”
“He’s lucky he’s already dead.” Or Rowe would kill him again.
She shivered. And he regretted scaring her. But her fear didn’t last, because she reached for his belt next, tugging it free to unsnap his jeans. He sucked in a breath when her fingers glided over his abs then dipped inside the waistband of his boxers.
“Macy…”
She bit her bottom lip. “I really want this. I really want you.”
Was she trying to convince him or herself?
“Are you sure?” he asked, because with every touch of her soft hands, he was getting closer and closer to totally losing control.
She bit her bottom lip and nodded. “It’s about the only thing I am sure of right now.”
He understood that. With all the doubts, suspicions and betrayals in his world right now, she was the only one he could count on. The only one he could hang on to. But before he could close his arms around her, she reached behind herself.
So used to people betraying him, he braced himself for a minute, not knowing what she was reaching for. It could have been that vicious little scalpel again. But then her bra dropped onto the floor, and he realized she’d just undone the clasp. Her jeans followed, as she unsnapped and shimmied out of those and her cotton panties. She stood before him completely naked and completely vulnerable, her wide eyes dark with desire and nerves.
“It’s been a while for me,” she admitted, her voice shaky with those nerves. “But I—I think you need to get rid of your jeans, too.” She reached for his zipper.
But he stepped back. He just wanted to stare at her, to drink in every inch of her silky flesh and soft curves. It was himself he didn’t trust right now. Because if he let her touch him, he might lose all control and take her with all the passion burning inside him for her.
And she had already been handled too roughly. She deserved a gentleness he wasn’t even sure he was capable of.
MACY SHIVERED AGAIN, TREMBLING at the intense look in his light blue eyes.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. Had he changed his mind? Had she totally repulsed him?
His breath shuddered out in a ragged sigh. “You are so damn beautiful…”
Bruised and battered, she felt anything but beautiful until she met his gaze. Desire heated the normal icy blue of his eyes, making them glow in the fading light.
Then he kissed her again, deeply. And his hands moved over her, gently, just skimming across her skin. He touched every inch of her and his mouth followed the path of his hands, kissing the curve of her shoulder, the inside of her elbow, the back of her knee…until she trembled so much with desire that her legs wouldn’t hold her weight. She fell back onto the mattress.
She lay there alone but just until he finally unzipped and dropped his jeans. She gasped at the masculine beauty of him. Since she had spent so much of her life studying, she hadn’t done much dating and had had only one lover, the man she had thought she would marry one day. She’d had her whole life planned out.
She hadn’t planned on Rowe Cusack and the feelings that he elicited from her. Just looking at his masculine perfection—all the rippling muscles under sleek skin—had her nipples peaking and an intense pressure winding tight inside her.
Then he joined her, covering her body with his. He kissed her lips and then skimmed his mouth down her throat to the curve of her breast. His lips closed over one tight nipple, tugging gently before he stroked the peak with his tongue.
She shifted beneath him as the pressure wound even tighter, unbearably tighter. Instinctively seeking to release it, she arched her hips against his. But he was in no hurry. He took his time with both breasts, thoroughly teasing each nipple.
She clutched at his head, first holding him against her and then trying to pull him away. But instead of moving his mouth up, back to hers, he shifted lower, skimming his lips down her stomach. He gently kissed the bruised skin and then moved lower, between her legs. He loved her with his mouth, his tongue stroking her until an orgasm shuddered through her.
The aftershocks rippled inside her, but then he was there, his erection pushing against the very core of her. She arched and stretched, trying to take him deeper. But he was so hard, so thick. She shifted and clutched at his back, and then his butt, writhing beneath him as the pressure built again.
He thrust in and out, driving her closer and closer to the edge of complete insanity. And finally the madness claimed her. She screamed his name as she came.
He thrust a few more times, harder and deeper, until he tensed and joined her in the madness. A groan tore from his throat as he buried himself deep inside her and clutched her close. He rolled, though, so that she was on top, lying across his slick chest, which rose and fell with his labored breaths.
His voice gruff with passion, he tried to talk. “That was…”
Beyond anything she had ever experienced before. It didn’t matter to Macy that her experience was limited; she knew that what they had just shared was special. So special that guilt tugged at her. “I’m sorry….”
His hands, which had been stroking her back, stilled. “You’re sorry?”
“Not about this,” she assured him. She had never been less sorry about anything in her life. Making love with Rowe was the last thing she would regret. “I’m sorry that I haven’t told you everything.”
He arched a golden-blond brow. “Are you married?” he teased with the knowledge that she wasn’t.
Jed had certainly told him a lot about her. Jed…
She couldn’t think about her brother right now. She would have to face those fears later.
“I should be,” she admitted. It had been part of her plan. “But my ex-fiancé…” Or almost fiancé since he hadn’t actually bought the ring yet. “My ex-fiancé dumped me when I wouldn’t turn my back on Jed.”
And worry that Rowe would turn his back on her brother was what had kept her from admitting everything to him.
“He was a fool,” he declared of a man he had never met.
Not that Macy thought he was wrong.
“He thought I was the fool,” she said. “Dr. Bernard and the warden think I’m a fool, too.” Even her own parents had thought she was.
“Well, you can’t believe anything the warden tells you,” he said. “The man’s a liar and a cold-blooded killer.”
She sucked in a breath, bracing herself for her question. “Then you don’t believe that my brother killed Doc?”
Beneath her, his body tensed. “What?”
“That’s what Warden James told Dr. Bernard. That Jed killed Doc.” She gazed up at his face, silently begging him to call the warden a liar again.
But he hesitated.
“You don’t believe that Jed did?” she asked anxiously. Because if Rowe believed, then she might begin to doubt her brother, too. He hadn’t committed the crimes of which he’d been charged. But since his conviction, he had been locked up with killers.
Had he become one?
Rowe spoke slowly as if choosing his words carefully. “If Jed thought that Doc might talk and betray him…”
“Jed wouldn’t hurt someone even to protect himself.” She knew her brother better than that; prison couldn’t have changed him that much from the honorable, protective man he had always been.
A twinge of guilt clutched her heart that she had doubted him even for a moment. She shouldn’t have said anything to Rowe, because she couldn’t have him doubting Jed either…because then he might decide against helping him.
“You wouldn’t be here if Jed was concerned with protecting himself,” she reminded him, “because he would have chosen to kill you instead of going against the warden.”
“Do I think Jed would kill someone to protect himself?” Rowe asked, and shook his head in reply to his own question. “Probably not. But your brother would do anything to protect you.”
That was what she was afrai
d of—that Jed might have killed for her. She blinked back tears of regret, that her presence in Blackwoods had forced him to protect her, and disillusionment that her brother could hurt anyone. Even for her.
Offering comfort and protection, Rowe’s strong arms closed tightly around her. “I would do anything to protect you, too…”
She didn’t know what scared her more—that men would kill for her. Or that, in trying to kill to protect her, they might die instead.
Chapter Eleven
Protecting Macy meant locking her inside a safe house so that she wouldn’t insist on putting herself in the line of fire as she had in the alley.
Rowe had waited until she’d fallen asleep before leaving her. Of course he’d had to wait and make certain that she was deeply asleep before he’d crawled out of the warm bed they had shared. He might have also been savoring the feeling of her in his arms, curled against his chest, her heart thudding in perfect rhythm with his.
Leaving her had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. But if he really wanted to protect her, he had to eliminate the threat to her safety. And he was nearly as much a threat as the warden and whoever had betrayed him to the warden.
Inside another house, back in the city, Rowe stepped out of the shadows. Then, with his target in sight, he cocked his gun.
Brennan jerked awake, in the recliner where he’d fallen asleep in front of the TV. A beer clutched in his hand, he fumbled with the can, spilling it over his T-shirt before reaching for the weapon he’d left on the end table. But Rowe already had that in his hand.
“What the hell—” his old partner and training officer grumbled, brushing his hand over his face as if he couldn’t believe he was really seeing Rowe in his living room.
Had he thought he would be dead by now? That some of those bullets in the alley had struck him?
“You seem surprised to see me,” Rowe remarked bitterly.
Brennan shuddered. “What the hell is the matter with you that you’d break into my place like this, pointing a gun at me!”
“You know,” Rowe challenged him to admit to his duplicity.
The retired cop shook his head. “I have no idea what’s going on with you. First you quit the job you’ve always wanted—”
“I didn’t quit,” Rowe vehemently denied. “And you already know that.”
The older man sighed. “Damn. Damn it. I knew it wasn’t right, that something was going on…”
“You knew that I would never quit the DEA.” Not when it was all he’d talked about when he’d been a naive rookie with Detroit P.D.
“At first, I figured that your quitting must have been part of a cover for a new assignment,” Brennan said. “And I don’t have the clearance to know what’s going on inside the DEA. I don’t even want to know.”
“But you know that something’s going on,” Rowe reminded him of what he’d just admitted. “What the hell is it?”
Brennan shrugged. “I don’t know. A lot of people just seem really anxious about you. Someone must have spotted you in the lobby today…” He glanced to the light streaking through his living room blinds. “Yesterday…”
“You know about the shots fired at me.” And Macy. He flinched as he remembered the blood trickling down her pale face. For a moment he thought she’d been killed. “In the alley behind Jackson’s apartment.”
Brennan gasped. “Hell, no, I didn’t know about that! Was that little gal with you then?”
Rowe nodded.
“Is she all right?”
“She’s safe.” In spite of him, not because of him. “If you didn’t know about the shots, how do you know that someone spotted me?”
“After what you said, about keeping quiet about seeing you,” Brennan reminded him, “I intended to erase the security footage from when you were there.”
“That could have gotten you fired,” Rowe warned him with a flash of guilt that he’d doubted his former law enforcement teacher.
The older man shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now. It got pulled and sent up to your old department before I could erase it.”
“Do you know who ordered it?”
He shook his gray-haired head. “Only a few agents had cleared security and were up on your floor when it was ordered.”
“Who?”
Brennan sighed. “This could get me fired, too, sharing classified information with an exagent.” But he didn’t hesitate before adding, “Tillman, Hernandez and O’Neil.”
Rowe cursed. “They’re all good agents.”
Damn good agents with more years of experience than he had, and a lot more connections in the hierarchy of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Rowe couldn’t accuse any one of them of corruption without some damn compelling evidence.
“What’s going on, kid?” Brennan asked, weariness spreading more lines across his face.
“The less you know the better…” Or his old training officer might wind up like Jackson and Doc. And probably Jed Kleyn…
Brennan gestured toward the gun Rowe clutched yet in one hand. “So I wasn’t wrong to think I might need that tonight?”
“No, you weren’t wrong,” Rowe said, confirming that the older man’s instincts were as sharp as they had ever been. “If someone saw you talking to me, you could be in danger.”
“That’s what I thought,” Brennan agreed. His hand shaking and sloshing what was left of his beer, he set the can on the table next to his chair. “That’s why I was sitting up, trying to stay awake, so I’d be ready if anyone came after me.” He wearily shook his head in self-disgust over his failure. “Maybe Detroit P.D. was right to retire me.”
Rowe wanted to make sure that his friend’s retirement didn’t become permanent. “You need to get out of here,” he said. “Get yourself someplace safe until I tell you it’s all over.”
He didn’t want to lose anyone else who mattered to him. He didn’t want anyone else losing his life because of him….
“You got that girl stashed someplace like that?” Brennan asked. “Someplace none of those agents can find her?”
He had thought he had…until he’d learned which agents might have betrayed him.
Tillman had military experience in addition to all his years with DEA. He had carried out countless special ops, bringing back intel that had saved many lives.
Hernandez had gone deeper undercover than any other agent, spending years with drug cartels that had cut off heads and cut out hearts of people they’d only suspected were informants. He was brilliant and slick.
O’Neil worked twice as hard as every other agent, determined to prove herself smarter and stronger than any male agent. And she had proved herself over and over again with arrests that no one else could have pulled off.
If he’d been considered a potential threat, any one of them could have been tracking his prior movements and found his private safe house.
And Rowe had left Macy locked up inside. She was alone and defenseless. Sure, she was tough and smart and resilient. But that had been against a warden of a backwater prison and a drug addict—not against a trained and experienced DEA agent.
FOR THE SECOND TIME in less than twenty-four hours, pain awakened Macy. It throbbed along her swollen jaw and ached in her stomach where she’d been kicked. Twinges of pain even pulled at her back and her neck and shoulders from the impact her body had absorbed when the SUV had rear-ended her van.
But then she had other aches, delicious aches in places she hadn’t been touched in so long and never as deeply as Rowe had touched her. She stretched, spreading her arms wide across the mattress, reaching for him so that he could make her hurt in another way. In a wicked, wonderful way…
But her hands patted only tangled blankets and sheets. He was gone.
She opened her eyes and looked around the cavernous room. Sunlight streaked through a narrow window that was at least twenty feet above the cement floor. The light was bright enough to illuminate the wide-open space and the bed that was empty of anyone but her.
She glanced toward the bathroom that was tucked into a corner of the hangar; the door stood fully open. Nobody was inside shaving at the sink or standing in the glass-walled shower.
“Rowe?” Her voice echoed off the open rafters and metal ceiling. “Rowe!”
He’d left her. He had made love to her and then he’d just left her alone?
Had it been a trick, a way to distract her so that he could get away from her?
“Damn you!” She threw back the covers and grabbed up the clothes she had dropped onto the cold cement floor next to the bed.
She had undressed for him. She had begged him to stay with her, to make love with her. Heat rushed to her face, adding to the pain in her jaw, as embarrassment consumed her. She’d thrown herself at the man.
Did he know why, that it was because she was beginning to have feelings for him? Or did he think it was just another thing, that he was just another thing she’d done to get her brother out of prison?
He had been curiously quiet after she’d told him about the warden’s accusation that Jed had killed Doc. Had he changed his mind about helping her brother? Had he changed his mind about her?
She glanced out the window to the unfinished half of the metal hangar and noticed her car, with its broken windows, was the only vehicle left in the space. The truck, she’d noticed when he’d brought her to the hangar, was gone.
She hurriedly dressed and headed toward the door. But when she tried the knob, it refused to budge. The lock was the kind that could only be opened with a key. He had locked her inside?
She turned toward the window, but the one to the outside was up too high on the wall for her to reach even if she piled furniture up beneath it. And the window that opened onto the other half of the hangar was reinforced with a steel grid and what was probably bulletproof glass. She wouldn’t be able to break it to free herself.
“Son of a bitch…”
What kind of safe house was this?
The kind that kept a witness in as well as the criminals out. No wonder he hadn’t lost the witness; the guy hadn’t been able to run. And neither could Macy. Why would Rowe do this to her?
Lawman Lover - Lisa Childs Page 12