He had it out and the wrapper open in record time. Before he could roll it on, she took over. Slipped it over him as he twitched and bit back a moan.
He wasn’t sure when she stripped off her underwear, but she traveled back up his body naked and determined. His hands settled on her hips and he guided her down. She slipped over him and sank down with her inner muscles grabbing him and pulling him in deeper.
Praise gravity or her expertise, but the plunging inside her wiped out the last of the hold on his control. His hips lifted off the bed as he moved in and out. Her fingernails dug into his chest and her knees pressed against his sides. Heat swirled around them and his breathing hitched.
He barely felt or heard any of it. His body took over, a sensation so primal and raw that it ripped through him. His hips shifted and her body wrapped around his. By the time he let go and let the orgasm overcome him, he no longer saw anything but her body covering his. That face so close to his as he threaded his fingers through hers.
It took more than a few minutes for his brain to blink on again. When he finally opened his eyes he looked up at the off-white ceiling and tried to regain his breathing.
Her hair rested against his cheek and her head fit into the space under his chin. She had pulled up the comforter, somehow wrestled it out from under their bodies, and it now covered their legs.
“Okay,” she said into the quiet darkness.
That was a pretty big understatement as far as he was concerned. “Okay?”
“Not a reflection of anything other than the fact it’s the only word I could form right then.” Her voice sounded breathy and uneven.
“That’s less insulting than saying okay. Sounds better.”
The sex knocked the life out of both of them. All that heat and friction. He was happy Paul didn’t expect him tomorrow because there was no way in hell he was getting up early.
She lifted her leg higher against his until every part of her touched a part of him. “You know, there’s a secondary benefit to us having sex.”
“I’m pretty happy about the main benefit,” he said.
“You don’t have to sleep on the sofa bed.”
That sounded promising. A little like progress, actually.
He lifted his head and stared down at her. “Are you inviting me into your . . . well, technically my . . . bed from now on?”
The second he said the words he wondered if he’d gone too far. Presumed too much.
She kept her eyes closed and her hand over his heart. “You’ve been very good.”
A part of him loved her chattiness after sex. Another part of him wanted a nap. “Then my plan worked.”
“This was all about getting a better mattress for you, wasn’t it?”
She rarely showed this side of her—playful and uninhibited—and he was a fan. “Of course.”
“You evil genius.”
“Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll prove what a genius I am.” When she groaned, he figured that was one step too far. “Too much?”
“I’m willing to ignore the cheesiness.”
“No one has ever accused me of that before.” He tried to imagine what the people he did business deals with would think of that.
“You didn’t know me before.”
“I’m much luckier now.” The words slipped out but he meant them.
She smiled with her eyes closed. “Yeah, you are.”
Chapter 17
Connor didn’t get up the next morning until after nine. He hadn’t slept that late in years but Maddie had worn him out. Two more rounds, including one this morning, and he needed more than coffee to get him moving. The eggs helped. So did the fresh air.
He stood about twenty feet from the front of his cabin, in a small clearing near a clump of trees. He’d retrieved some of the dry wood from the shed at the back of the property and started cutting. It had been years since he’d wielded an ax. When he was growing up, his parents had a small place on a lake in Maryland. His father’s workaholic tendencies had relaxed there. He sat outside and tutored his kids on the fine art of fishing and firewood collection.
The years passed and the memory faded. Now it made Connor smile.
“How long are you staying? On Whitaker, I mean.”
At the sound of Maddie’s still sleepy voice, he looked up. She sat on the bottom step leading up to the porch. She’d thrown on his sweatshirt, which looked like a tent on her. Her tablet rested on her lap, meaning a call could interrupt them any minute.
She looked relaxed while she sipped her coffee, but that was a loaded question. Connor treaded carefully. “That’s out of the blue.”
“Is it?” She tapped her sneakered feet against the step and cradled her mug. “You’re supposed to be here on vacation, which usually would mean relaxing. I haven’t seen you sit still since you got here.”
Her gaze wandered over him. He felt every move and every frown. Looking down, he didn’t see anything odd. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. Too light for the weather, but he’d been chopping wood for a half hour. Not exactly the desk work he was used to.
“A lot has happened.” That struck him as the truth. He’d been here about a week and it felt more like months.
“Including the part where you got roped into helping me.”
He leaned the ax against a stump and walked over to her. The conversation walloped him. He hadn’t seen it coming and struggled to answer. “Let’s be clear about one thing. If I didn’t want to be with you, I would leave.”
She looked down into her mug. “Right. Okay.”
“You don’t believe me.” What the hell was that about? They’d been all over each other the night before. There wasn’t an inch of her that he hadn’t touched and kissed. Seemed to him the time for an interrogation was before they climbed into bed.
“You’re a rescuer. I landed on your doorstep and . . .”
“What?” Every word she uttered ticked him off. The reaction was overblown and irrational but his temper ran away and he had trouble dragging it back under control.
“Sometimes you look at me like a bird with a broken wing.”
“That’s not true.” He didn’t see her like that at all. Mysterious and sometimes careless. Not as worried about her safety as she should be, but a survivor. The person who would rush into danger to keep anyone else from getting hurt. Not a bystander. Definitely not broken.
Her eyes narrowed as her head tipped slightly to one side. “Be honest. Is there a part of you that looks at me and sees your sister?”
Sweet hell. “You’re asking that after last night?”
“Don’t be weird. Not the sex. I mean . . .” She stared into the trees as if she were searching for the right words. “Is this really about a driving need to make sure I survive when she didn’t?”
The words sliced through him. “Wow.”
“Are you stalling while you think of an answer?”
“No.” He was trying to figure out what kind of asshole she thought he was. Pathetic, stumbling around. Not knowing what he really wanted.
What the fuck?
The more frustrated he became, the calmer she looked. She set her mug and tablet on the step beside her and folded her arms on her knees. “Have you let yourself grieve at all?”
He shook his head. The conversation had taken off on this gallop. He didn’t understand where they took a wrong turn or what changed since breakfast. She went to get dressed and he came outside and—bam!—she now thought of him as some sort of . . . he didn’t even know what.
“What’s happening right now? How did we go from showering together to this?” He really didn’t get it.
“We can’t avoid the topic forever.”
“But when did I become the topic?”
She lowered each leg until her feet rested on the grass below. “Because it’s more comfortable when all the focus is on me and protecting me and watching over me, right?”
“I feel like we’re fighting and I’m not sure why.”
&nb
sp; She stood up and walked over to him. Stopped a few feet away. Close enough to touch but they didn’t. “I don’t want you to look at me like someone you need to fix.”
“Sweet hell, Maddie. I look at you and my breath stops. I want to drag you home and strip you naked, and none of that has to do with rescuing you.”
Some of the tension left her face. “What is it about?”
She looked as confused as he felt. Nothing about last night prepared him for this topic. They kept flipping around and now they’d landed on something that sounded like what are your intentions? and he couldn’t get his bearings. “I don’t know. I don’t really get why you have me spinning in circles when no woman in a year even piqued my interest enough to ask her out for coffee.”
“Spinning?”
“Confused. Off balance.” Did she really not know the definition? “I haven’t focused on anything but work and my family for almost two years. Then you come along and . . .” He didn’t know how to describe these feelings for her because he didn’t understand them. They hit him out of nowhere and kept knocking him down. “You’re in my head all the time. From the moment we met in Ben’s office.”
She blinked at him a few times. “No one has ever said that to me before.”
No, he didn’t want the soft eyes and lighter tone. She had him revved up and ticked off and maybe he needed to stay that way for a while. “Yeah, well, I didn’t expect it. I sure as hell didn’t plan on you.”
“But then I lured you into my mess.”
Enough about that first meeting. He’d let that go a long time ago. “With or without what happened that first night in the cabin, I would have found you on Whitaker. This—us—was inevitable.”
She frowned at him. “How do you figure that? I’m a recluse, remember?”
She just kept picking a fight. She would wind up and unload, then calm down. The emotional roller coaster confused him. “You’ve been all over town with me. That’s not what a recluse does.”
“Or, maybe, I haven’t had a choice because of the babysitting.”
No way was he letting her tag him as the bad guy in this scenario. “Ever think that you’re sticking to my side because you want to be there?”
She snorted. “Of course.”
Somewhere between the yelling and the answer she lost him. “Wait . . .”
“If I didn’t want to be with you, kiss you, get to know you, I would have run and hid the second after we met.” She reached up and pushed the hair out of his eyes.
He waited for her to circle back to angry again but it didn’t happen. “What are you saying?”
“I’m surprised you feel the same way.”
The last of the anger and tension ran out of him. “It’s a weird thing to have in common.”
“There’s something about you.”
He should let it go and not ask. But he wasn’t that guy. He sought out answers. “Is that a good thing?”
“The hotness. The charm.”
Those sounded good. “Nice.”
“The pain.”
He groaned. “You ruined it.”
“You don’t even see it, do you?”
The conversation was over. He was not tiptoeing back into that mess of a topic. If she wanted to psychoanalyze someone, she could pick Ben.
He turned around and picked up the ax. “I need to finish this.”
“It’s possible we’re attracted to each other and pulled together by this weird unseen force because we’re not so different. We’re both in a type of mourning we still haven’t fully processed.”
He didn’t have any destination in mind but he started walking. Headed for the thick patch of trees. “Uh-huh.”
“We’re both trying to survive the aftermath.”
That’s it. He turned around to face her. “What are you surviving exactly? You know about my sister. I’m clueless about your past.”
“I got sucked into a crime and witnessed a murder. I want to say wrong place, wrong time, but I was where I was supposed to be. Missed the clues and then . . . there was so much blood.”
She said it right out, without prompting. The words sat there. He didn’t know what to say next. “Jesus.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“I’ll listen if you want to tell me more.” Whatever she said, he would handle it. She didn’t need him judging or rushing in with a thousand questions. She could take her time, but he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Not now.” She chewed on her bottom lip for a second. “But I will. Just give me a little more time.”
“Done.” His mind spun with possibilities. He tried to mentally put together the few facts he knew, but he couldn’t get a picture. All he knew was that the danger was real and sounded deadly. “But is the murder, what you saw, tied to the notes you’re getting now?”
“Must be since I don’t have any other big secrets in my past, even though I still don’t get how. All of that should be over.”
She seemed determined to tell him the part about the secrets. It’s the exact reason he didn’t buy it. That and the tone. Her voice dipped as if she was trying to convince both of them. “Really?”
“Which part?”
“I think you know.” When she continued to stare at him, he filled in the blank. “The secrets, Maddie. Do you really only have one?”
All of the emotion left her face. “Don’t analyze me.”
Apparently only she could play that game, or so she thought. But she was wrong. “You just said I was stuck in my grief.”
“You haven’t truly mourned your sister. That’s obvious.”
He blocked the words. Didn’t let them in his head. “Yet you’re fine.”
“I never said that.”
He had enough. He turned back around and continued walking.
She called after him. “Where are you going?”
“Not far.”
“It feels like you’re running away.”
“No, just going deeper into . . .” He saw the flash of red a few feet away and thought it was a shirt or a piece of trash. A few more steps told him he was dead wrong. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
He heard the crunch of her sneakers against the dead leaves and warned her off. He needed her away from this. Far away. “Are you carrying your cell?”
“Of course, why?”
She stood right behind him. He turned to tell her to go back to the cabin. “Maddie.”
It was too late. Her eyes focused on the spot over his shoulder and her mouth dropped open. “Oh, my God.”
Connor followed her gaze to the man lying facedown on the ground. Blood pooled around him. Connor tried to look anywhere but there. One glance and his stomach heaved. Seeing blood did that to him.
“Who is that?” Her voice vibrated with shock.
He understood exactly how she felt. “Call Ben.”
Chapter 18
Most people went their entire lives without seeing a dead body. This was Maddie’s second experience. She didn’t handle it this time any better than the first.
She sat in the conference room off of Ben’s office. She’d called her fill-in and asked her to take care of the answering service for a few days. There were only so many responsibilities she could handle at one time.
The dead body changed everything.
Sylvia had arrived and stuck a coffee in her hand then disappeared again. The caffeine helped. So did sitting across from Connor. He grounded her. They’d been in the middle of a difficult discussion. She’d kept pushing, couldn’t stop herself. The questions rolled out of her. She wanted to know about him, to make him see that the sister he loved was never really far from his thoughts, despite his insistence he was fine. Then they found the body and nothing else mattered.
He reached his hand across the table and covered hers. “You okay?”
“No.” She knew he wasn’t any better. He’d gagged more than once waiting for Ben to arrive at the cabin. “Are you?”
“Seeing blood ma
kes me queasy.”
She understood. It’s why she looked away. The idea that the poor man lay out there all alone while his life ran out of him doubled her over. “I guess you didn’t play sports growing up then.”
“I played soccer from the time I was little through college. Had my share of injuries. Once saw Hansen snap a bone to the point where it poked through his skin.” He stared at a spot on the table. Kept all his attention focused there. “Ever since we lost Alexis, I can’t see blood without thinking of her.”
Her heart flipped over. The pain stayed there, right at the surface. Spurred him on. Changed him.
She squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” He sat back in his chair. The move had his palm sliding against the table, away from her, until he put it on his lap. “So what happens now? I don’t fully get how this island works. Do the police fly in or what?”
She wasn’t in the mood to give a history lesson but the nonsense topic might keep both of their minds off of what they’d seen. “Ben is in charge but with something like this, at least last time, state investigators arrived. For a few days, they swarmed and asked questions and spent a lot of time with Ben.”
Connor tried to imagine how much the residents must hate the intrusion. “Damn.”
“I’m not sure exactly what the chain of command is, but Ben basically is Whitaker’s law enforcement. After last summer, he hired a full-time assistant, but he’s in training off Whitaker right now. So he’s no help.”
“Convenient.” When she stared at him, Connor realized he sounded a bit off. “I wasn’t saying it was a conspiracy. Just throwing out a word.”
“Maybe some of Whitaker’s paranoia rubbed off on you.”
“Let’s hope not.” No, really. He hoped not.
“Anyway.” She cleared her throat as if she were about to launch into a long speech. “Ben also has a few voluntary assistants and Doc Lela handles the forensics.”
“It’s a bit of a patchwork of people, isn’t it? You’d think Ben would have more permanent help.”
She shrugged. “Never needed it until recently.”
“You mean, until the Rye brothers arrived.”
The Secret She Keeps EPB Page 12