The problem was he hadn’t kissed just anyone; he’d kissed Daisy. And he’d known perfectly well how good it would be. Daisy kissed like she did everything else in life: with a full-steam-ahead, damn-the-torpedoes kind of passion. It wasn’t the sort of thing a guy forgot in a hurry—no matter how many years had gone by—and Nick could kick himself for reopening all the old cravings and regrets he’d thought long buried.
He reached for a chef’s knife and sliced the ends off two celery stalks. Dammit, he had buried those things once before, and he could do it again. His control was stronger than any random sexual urge.
He struggled with Daisy’s silence and his own thoughts for another minute or two, determined to hold his peace. But in the end he folded. “You going to sulk all night, Blondie?”
She spared him a cool glance before going back to her knives and guns. “I don’t sulk, Coltrane.”
As much as he hated to admit it, she rarely did. She neither pouted nor complained. She simply grew very quiet and looked straight through him.
Damned if he’d concede the point aloud, however. It bugged the bejesus out of him just how much her withdrawal was getting to him. Stoic was overrated, if you asked him, and considering how edgy he felt, he longed to see a reaction from her. He didn’t even care if it was a negative one, as long as it was a response. “What do you call the silent treatment you’ve been giving me, then?”
“Keeping my own counsel.”
“Yeah, right.” He cleaved a red pepper in two and cleaned out the seeds. “Like I said, cupcake—sulking.”
Daisy shrugged. “Call it whatever you want. I have nothing to say that you’d care to hear.”
He gave up. She’d talk again when she was good and ready, and not a moment before. And what the hell, chances were he wouldn’t have to wait that long, anyhow. He hadn’t met the woman yet who could stand to keep her mouth shut for more than an hour, and Daisy was already well over the limit. “Whatever. You play with your little war toys, then, and I’ll cook dinner. You hungry?”
She didn’t bother to look up again. “I could eat.”
He fantasized shaking her until her teeth rattled. But when his fantasies immediately hared off in another direction, he just as quickly roped them in and applied his knife aggressively to the veggies on the cutting board. Five minutes later, he scraped the vegetables into the wok on the stove. They hissed as they hit the splash of hot olive oil and rice vinegar in the bottom.
He called her to dinner a few moments later and they sat down to the places he’d set at the breakfast bar. If he’d hoped that the mundane act of eating would cool his raging emotions, however, he was doomed to disappointment. Every time Daisy reached for her milk glass, the scooped neckline of her tank top gaped. He couldn’t see more than a hint of the goods within, but that sure as hell didn’t prevent him from giving himself eye strain trying. The portion of rounded flesh that he did catch a glimpse of was enough to convince him she wasn’t wearing a bra, and the turmoil in his gut increased. By the time dinner was finished and she politely offered to clean up, he was ready to climb the walls. He watched her jeans pull tightly over the curve of her butt when she bent to load the dish-washer; his gaze tracked the dusting of freckles atop her shoulders and the smooth slide of muscle in her arms when she wiped down the counters. Shoving back abruptly from the bar, he said, “I’m going down to the darkroom for a while. I’ve got negatives to develop.”
Daisy gritted her teeth. Great. It had been one damn thing after another all day long, and her emotions were dangerously close to overload. This was just what she needed to cap off her day—to be cooped up in a tiny room with Nick Coltrane.
She bit back a sigh and tossed the sponge into the sink. Her personal wishes weren’t the issue; it was her job to protect him. “Give me a second to throw on a T-shirt.” The garage was likely to be cooler than it was up here.
Nick, who had grabbed his duffel bag and strode down the short hallway, stopped dead with his free hand on the doorknob. He scowled back at her. “What for? You aren’t coming with me.”
Daisy was in no mood to argue. “Of course I am. It’s the reason I’m here.”
“I’m only going down to the damn darkroom.”
“Well, correct me if I’m wrong here, Coltrane, but isn’t that the same place Johnson’s thugs trashed the other night, right before they dislocated your shoulder?”
He shrugged. “So I’ll lock the door.”
The look on his face made her feel like the importunate social climber the people in his world had always considered her. She was accustomed to that from others, but not from him, and she stared at him in silence for a moment. Then she turned on her heel and walked back into the living room.
She fully expected to hear him slam out of the apartment, and for a moment she didn’t care if he did. She was furious and felt unaccountably betrayed for the second time in too-few hours. Instead of the door opening, however, she heard his bag drop and his shoes slap against the hardwood floor as he came after her. Flopping down on the couch, she picked up a magazine and feigned an interest in pages that might as well have been blank. Her entire focus was on Nick as he skidded to a halt and loomed over her. She immediately locked on his agitation.
Good. She didn’t like feeling tense all by herself.
“I can’t breathe, dammit!”
He couldn’t breathe? Oh, God, that was rich. She hadn’t taken a deep breath since the moment he’d strolled back into her life. She’d done her utmost to keep him from seeing how deeply he affected her, but she felt as if she’d been living on the ragged edge of her emotions forever, and this was the last straw. Tossing aside the magazine, she surged to her feet. “Go, then! By all means, put yourself in danger. It’s no skin off my teeth, bud—I’ve got my retainer either way.”
He towered over her. “And that’s all you really give a damn about, isn’t it, Daisy? Your money.”
“As a matter of fact, I give a great big damn about my reputation—something you made eminently clear this afternoon you have no respect for. So, fine.” It wasn’t until she thrust her chin up at him that she realized just how close they were, and she took a giant step back. Reaching for some composure, she offered flatly, “I’ve given you my professional opinion about going down to the darkroom alone, but I can’t force you to abide by it. So go do whatever the hell you want.” She turned away.
His hand clamped down on her wrist, whirling her back. Off balance, she slammed up against his solid chest, and his other hand reached out to grip her upper arm, steadying her. “Just because I declined to file a report doesn’t mean I don’t respect the job you’ve done,” he snapped. Letting go of her arm but retaining his hold on her wrist, he headed for the door, forcing her to trot along in his wake or be jerked off her feet.
Daisy saw red. Damn him to hell! He was the only person in the universe who could routinely force her to lose her cool without even half trying. Breathing rapidly, reaching deep for control, she patted her gun and fantasized how satisfying it would be to shoot him right where he lived—in his big ego.
Nick must have caught a glimpse from the corner of his eye, for he snarled, “You pull your weapon on me, you better be prepared to use it.” Glancing over his shoulder as he bent to retrieve his bag, he added, “And don’t even think about tossing me in another one of your fancy martial arts maneuvers, Blondie, because I’ll sue your pants off. If you’re such a freakin’ professional, then act like one.” He loped down the stairs and she had the choice of keeping up or being bounced willy-nilly behind him like a pull-toy on a string.
White-hot rage rose up her throat. “I do act like one! Maybe if you’d quit sabotaging my efforts—”
“Oh, grow up. If you hadn’t blurted out my business in the middle of the police station lobby, I would’ve been more than happy to tell you in private that I’d changed my mind. I would’ve even given you my reasons why.”
Since she already harbored a huge load of guilt over that, th
e accusation effectively shut her up.
They entered the garage, which was several degrees cooler than the apartment upstairs. Goosebumps cropped up on Daisy’s arms as Nick dragged her to the back, where his darkroom was located. Pulling her inside, he shut the door and snapped on a light.
She jerked her arm free. “Happy now, Tarzan?”
“I’ll be happy the day I get that homicidal maniac off my back and my life under control again.” He frowned as she briskly rubbed her pebbled arms. His gaze glanced off her chest, and the next thing she knew, he was yanking his T-shirt over his head. “Here,” he said, tossing it to her. “Put that on. I didn’t give you a chance to grab your own.”
All the moisture in Daisy’s mouth dried up as the small room seemed to constrict in front of her eyes into a single wall of bare skin. She hurriedly pulled the shirt over her head, grateful for the excuse to block Nick from view. But his bare chest was right there to taunt her again the moment her head popped through the neck opening. The new crop of goosebumps that raced down her arms had an entirely different origin than the ones that had prompted him to give her the shirt off his back.
“This really isn’t necessary,” she said, but hugged the shirt around her to absorb its retained body heat. Her gaze stubbornly refused to look away from his body.
Oh, God, this was awful. How on earth had she ever forgotten how gorgeous he was without his clothing? Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to concede that she hadn’t actually forgotten, so much as blocked the memory out of her mind.
And, oh, Lord. For a very good reason.
Between Nick’s height, his loose-limbed way of moving, and the relaxed-fit clothing he favored, it was easy to underestimate the power of his build. Stripped to the waist, however, that power was impossible to ignore.
His shoulders and chest were broader than she remembered, but still defined by lean layers of muscle. Soft veins snaked beneath the skin on his forearms, and dark hair spread a virile fan across his chest before dwindling into a silky stripe down his diaphragm and stomach, to disappear beneath the waistband of his jeans. And he was golden-skinned all over.
That was one of her most persistent memories of him: that he always seemed so golden. She’d never been able to figure out quite why that was, since he was not a man to lie around in the sun. Yet she remembered him glowing in his tennis whites on the club court when she was sixteen. And she remembered his tawny skin glistening with a fine sheen of sweat as he’d propped himself over her on a cold November evening.
Oh, shit, oh, shit. She would not remember that. It had hurt so much and had taken forever before she’d been able to block it out, and she was damned if she’d allow it to get a toehold on her emotions now.
Trying to find a spot where she’d be out of the way in the tiny room, she observed the play of muscles in Nick’s back as he pulled bottles off the overhead shelf, and sternly assured herself that the tension coiling inside of her had nothing to do with the sight of a little skin. And even if it did…Focus, she urged herself. All you have to do is focus on something else.
“Hit the lights, Daisy.”
She started. “What?” She was desperately grateful when he pulled on a ratty, once-white lab coat and began buttoning it up.
“The lights. Turn ’em off, will you? The switch is on the wall behind you.”
She flipped the switch and drew in a deep breath of relief as the room plunged into absolute blackness.
9
NICK welcomed the sudden darkness. He was so visual that he could still picture her, even without the light. But at least the sights and textures that had bombarded him were given a chance to pull back from the edge of meltdown.
He felt along the countertop in front of him for a roll of exposed film, popped the top off its tiny plastic canister, and tipped it out into his palm. He wound the film onto a stainless steel reel. Placing the reel on a spindle, he felt for another roll of film and continued the process until all five reels were safely in the light-tight canister. “Okay. You can turn the lights back on.”
Narrowing his eyes against the sudden glare, he reached for the brown plastic jug of developer and measured it into the tank with the can of reels. He set the timer and stood over the tank, gently agitating the canister in a steady side-to-side movement, using care not to cause bubbles, which would increase the graininess of his negatives.
“It’s pretty labor-intensive, huh?”
Daisy’s voice jerked him out of the semi-trance of concentration he always fell into when he developed negatives. Now she wanted to talk? Murphy’s Law was clearly alive and well. For a few brief moments he’d been able to forget that he shared a very small room with a woman who kissed like something out of his hottest wet dream. He’d managed to forget the sight of her nipples poking at the thin material of her tank top, and the sexual tension that had tied him in knots since walking into her office yesterday had momentarily melted away.
It came roaring back. “Yes,” he replied tersely.
“How come you don’t use one of those red lights?”
“Because I’m developing film, not paper. When I make my prints, I’ll use the red light.”
The timer went off and he drained the developer, added stop bath, then went back to agitating, glad that she’d fallen silent again. A short while later he drained the tank again and reached for the fixer, but it wasn’t there. Douglass’ goons had emptied it all over the floor. Swearing softly, he remembered he’d meant to pull a new jug out of the storage cabinet, and he turned to get it.
Daisy stood in front of the cabinet door, and without thinking he grasped her by the hips and moved her aside. He felt her stiffen beneath his hands.
“Hey!”
“Sorry. But I need this now.” Although time was of the essence, he really wished he hadn’t touched her. Even though his hands had cupped her hips only fleetingly, it’d been long enough to register that she was warm and firm. The tension in the little room ratcheted several degrees higher.
Cracking open the new jug, he turned back to the workbench and then added the fixer to the tank.
He was grateful for the work that required his attention during the next several minutes. He agitated the container occasionally, then checked his negatives and returned them to the fixer, repeating the process until the films were clear. Once he put them in the wash, however, he ran out of excuses to ignore Daisy.
He heard a rustle behind him, and could picture her shifting her weight from one foot to the other. He knew without looking how the tilt of her hip would ease in, and how a second later she’d cock the opposite hip. He located busywork to occupy his hands, capping and putting away jugs of chemicals, wiping up spills with a brown-stained rag—anything to promote the pretense that the room wasn’t steadily shrinking around him. And all the while, he was aware of every breath she drew, every move she made.
Finally he tossed the rag aside and turned to face her. “Listen, the negatives need to stay in the wash for at least half an hour. We might as well go back upstairs.” Where there’s room to move without tripping all over each other. He stripped off his lab coat, tossed it on a hook, then turned to herd her toward the door.
His intention was to decrease this wracking awareness and put some space between them, but it went up in flames the moment they both reached for the doorknob at the same time.
His bare arm slid along hers, and her skin was warm and soft and smooth, and the cool control in which he took such pride evaporated like mist before a blowtorch. An animalistic growl sounded low in his throat, and he whirled her around and crowded her up against the door, leaning into her, reveling in the soft feel of her breasts as they flattened beneath the press of his chest. He bent his head and kissed her—a hot, undisciplined kiss that was all dominance. His fingers gripped her head to hold her still as he plundered her mouth, but even in the face of his aggression, Daisy kissed him back for several scorching, breathless minutes.
Freeing a hand, he yanked up her bo
rrowed T-shirt and slid a hand onto her tank-top-covered breast. It was a soft, round, giving weight beneath the press of his hand, and her nipple drilled like a diamond bit into his palm. He curled his fingers, shaping and tugging, molding the sweet form to his will.
He felt her hands work between their bodies, and he groaned at the feel of skin against hot skin when her fingers splayed against his chest. Then she gave a shove and he stumbled backward. His back hit the counter and he grabbed for the edge with his elbows. Blinking at Daisy through the hank of hair that fell over his eyes, he watched the rapid rise and fall of her breasts beneath his too-big T-shirt, and felt sluggish and stupid as he struggled to comprehend the abrupt shift in gears.
“What…?”
Daisy looked back at him, and with her pulse hammering in places that only seemed to have a pulse with him, it felt as if she were viewing him through the narrow end of a long, red, pulsating corridor. She saw him with crystal clarity, however. Even wearing a befuddled expression and slumped with his elbows hooked over the counter behind him, there was something magnetic about him.
And if that wasn’t a poisonous trap poised to spring, she didn’t know what was. She watched him straighten up. “You keep your distance, Coltrane,” she ordered in a raspy voice when he took a step toward her. Suddenly, containing the bitterness that she’d tucked away for nine long years was like trying to hold water in a colander: it leaked messily everywhere she turned. She watched him roughly finger-comb his hair out of his eyes and refused to be sucked in by the perfection of his face or the symmetry of his hard torso. “You had your shot at me when I was nineteen—and you didn’t think I was worth keeping. Well, that was your only chance, you son of a bitch. Once you’ve thrown me away, you don’t get another.”
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