Guilty as Sin

by Jami Alden

  In that, it was just like the first time.

  But in every other way, what was happening between them now was completely different. Somehow in the past two days the barriers they’d both been so determined to maintain came crashing down, and now there was no holding back. No pretending that this was nothing more than two people indulging their curiosity.

  She was falling in love with him, she realized. Or maybe she’d been in love with him all along. Her body stiffened in shock at the revelation, putting a little crack in the spell Tommy was weaving with his hands, his mouth, his body.

  “What is it? Did I hurt you?” he said, breathless, so in tune with her he immediately felt the subtle shift in her.

  “No,” she quickly reassured him. Not yet anyway, and not the way you think.

  “Are you sure?” His voice was tight with the effort to restrain himself, his muscles quivering under her hands as he held himself back. He bent his head and kissed her, his tongue sliding against hers. “I never want to hurt you, Katie,” he murmured, and bent his head to her breast and gave her nipple a firm tug of his mouth.

  Kate cried out as the sensation went straight to her core, making her clench around him and rock her hips to take him even deeper.

  “I never want to hurt you again, Katie,” he said again, his hips resuming their slow, steady rhythm as he threaded his hands through her hair and locked his stare with hers. “I only want to make you feel good from now on. Let me make you feel good.”

  There was something in his touch, in his voice, in the very way he moved against her that told her he wasn’t just talking about physically. Her fear slipped away as his words rang in her head. I never want to hurt you. I only want to make you feel good.

  She gave herself over to him, to pleasure, to the crazy connection that fourteen years apart and deep wells of pain couldn’t manage to break. She moaned as he hitched one knee higher and thrust deep, punctuating it with a tight circle of his hips that stirred her pleasure to the breaking point.

  Her hands circled his back, slid down to the rock-hard muscles of his ass, urging him faster. But he tormented her with those slow, circling thrusts, shoving himself so deep inside her she felt like she could absorb him into her skin. Then the swirling twist that had him touching bundles of nerves she hadn’t ever known existed.

  Tommy felt himself grow impossibly harder as Kate’s moans grew higher, more frantic. The feel of her fingers with their short nails digging into his ass sent a jolt of sensation straight to his cock. He loved this, loved that he could make her so insane with need that she forgot everything else. He didn’t want it to end, wanted to draw out their pleasure. He never wanted to leave this place where her world focused only on him and how good he could make her feel.

  Just as his world had become centered on Kate and only Kate. On the taste of her mouth under his, the feel of her arms and legs locking him to her like she never wanted to let him go. And, oh Christ, the sweet, tight perfection of her body rippling and squeezing around his cock with every long, deep thrust.

  He pushed so deep his balls nestled against the soft curve of her ass, and still he felt like he couldn’t get deep enough, close enough. Like he wanted to get as close to her as he possibly could and never come up for air. He shifted, circled his hips, feeling a burst of satisfaction when she let out another sharp cry as he ground against the needy little bud of her clit.

  “Tommy, please,” she moaned as he circled again, and he could feel her body stiffen, knew she was right on the edge.

  He reached between their bodies and found her clit with his thumb, stroking and circling her in rhythm with his deep, circling thrusts. Her mouth opened on a silent scream and he groaned as she shuddered against him, her body clenching and releasing him in long pulls, as though trying to draw him deeper.

  A few hard, fast thrusts and Tommy followed her over the edge.

  He collapsed to the pillow and pulled her across his chest as he waited for his breath to slow and his heart to resume a pace that didn’t feel like it was going to pound out of his chest. The last aftershocks of his orgasm faded, and as he blinked in soft evening light pouring through his bedroom window, he waited for the urge to bolt to set in.

  He got the urge every single time he had sex with a woman, without fail. Didn’t matter if it was a one-night stand or a woman he’d been seeing regularly for a while. After the last pulses of pleasure drifted away and the chemical surge drained from his brain, he couldn’t drown out the little voice that urged him to get up, get out, get away. He needed space, he needed air, because the aftermath of sex was always just a little too real for him to deal with.

  He anticipated it tonight, prepared to push through it as he had in the past when he’d cared for his partner enough to not want to hurt her feelings. And God knew the last thing he wanted to do was hurt Kate’s feelings. She was already skittish about what was going on between them. Once he’d been certain he hadn’t physically hurt her, he’d recognized the fear that had caused her to freeze up.

  And who could blame her, considering the way things had ended up the last time? Hell, he was scared shitless himself, but he was determined to work through it if she was. He didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that jumping out of bed like she was on fire and secreting himself away in his office was no way to boost her confidence about what was happening between them.

  Yet as he lay there, stroking his hand up and down her back, feeling the soft puff of her breath against his chest, the urge never came.

  Kate must have felt him stiffen, because she propped herself on his chest and looked up. “What?”

  Tommy took a strand of her hair between his fingers, his brows furrowing. “I feel like I never want to leave this bed.”

  One reddish blond brow quirked. “You make it sound like it’s a bad thing.”

  Tommy shook his head. “Not bad, just different, for me.”

  She gave him a shy smile and inched her way up his chest until she could reach his mouth. She pressed a soft, lingering kiss to his lips. “Good. Because all of this is very different for me too.”

  “So what happens now that we’ve found Tricia?”

  Kate’s lips pressed together and her pale shoulders shrugged. “I’ll stay a few more days to see if there’s any way I can help CJ with the investigation and make sure Tricia, Jackson, and Brooke are connected to people who can help them work through all of this.”

  “Then what?”

  Kate’s gaze dropped under his intense stare. “I go back to L.A., continue my work at the foundation.”

  Tommy hooked her chin with his finger and lifted it until her eyes met his. “I don’t suppose you’d have much reason to come back to Sandpoint?”

  Kate’s lips quirked in a half smile. “Depends on how certain I’d be of my welcome.”

  Tommy pulled her up his body until her chest was pressed against his and her legs were splayed on either side of his hips. “I think you can rest assured it would be very, very warm.”

  He trailed soft kisses across her cheek and down her neck. “What about San Francisco?”

  “Mm, what about it?” she said as she arched her neck to give him better access.

  “I’m consulting for Jackson on the company he’s starting in the Bay area, so I’ll be spending a lot of time there in the next several months. It’s only, what, an hour plane ride from southern California? Then there’s my place in Seattle that’s easy enough for you to get to for a weekend.”

  “Sounds like I’ll be doing an awful lot of flying,” Kate teased.

  Tommy settled his hands over the soft curve of her ass and gave her a little squeeze. “I can go to L.A. In fact, I have a whole backlog of potential clients in that area that I haven’t taken on. You’d give me a good excuse to build up my business in that region.”

  Kate kissed him again, then pulled back, her gaze solemn. “You’ve really thought about this.”

  Tommy shrugged. “I’ve thought about you. The rest is ju
st figuring out logistics so I can do more than think about you when you leave town.”

  Her fingers curled into his chest, and he could feel the tension coiling in her body. “We’re really going to do this? After everything that happened, all this time, you really think we—”

  He stifled the flood of doubts with a kiss, releasing her only when she let out a soft sigh and relaxed against his chest. “I’m not fool enough to believe we can totally put the past behind us and move on like nothing ever happened. What happened to Michael, what happened after—it changed the way everything went. And it changed us. We became different people because of it. So I’m not looking to get back what we had or get another chance with the girl I fell for once upon a time. I want to be with the Kate you are now, with all baggage, all the scars.” He lifted her left wrist to his mouth and placed a hard kiss along the faint white line.

  When his eyes met hers again, he saw they were moist with tears. “I want that too,” she said.

  Chapter 25

  They were quiet for a while, and Kate snuggled against Tommy’s chest, marveling at the new feeling of closeness between them. Though she’d sensed him thawing in the past couple days, she’d never expected him to flat-out tell her he wanted to be with her. As he’d pointed out, they were different people than they’d been fourteen years ago, and she never would have expected the stoic, stony man Tommy seemed to have become to be so open about what he wanted from her. From them.

  Maybe he wasn’t as different as he wanted to believe. A tiny prickle of doubt penetrated her dreamy haze. Was it really possible for them to move past what had happened? Could she ever really get past the fear that her total loss of control around him would lead to disaster? Could he really get over the pain and trouble she’d caused, even if it was unintentional?

  Speaking of… “Are you ever going to tell me what you said in that letter?”

  Tommy grimaced and shook his head. “No point. It was written by a guy who doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Come on,” she urged. “I still see you, lurking underneath that hard-ass front you put on for everybody.”

  His face settled in grim lines and Kate got a queasy feeling that she’d really upset him. “There’s no front, Kate. What you see is what you get.” He pulled her hand up to the front of his right shoulder, pressed her fingers against a spot of skin that was ridged with scar tissue. “That scar is real. So’s this one.” He pulled her hand to a half-inch slit of scar tissue that zigzagged across a couple of ribs. “I spent a lot of time in a lot of places where there wasn’t a lot of room for rainbows and unicorns and sweetness and light.”

  Kate felt her mouth twist in a knowing smile. She was willing to bet she’d seen enough darkness to give him a run for his money. “Who needs rainbows when we can compare scars?” To emphasize her point, she set herself to running her lips and tongue over each one she found.

  By the time she found the last one, a starburst of white on his upper left thigh, she barely brushed her lips over it before Tommy was hauling her up by the shoulders and rolling her underneath him. “I stand corrected,” she gasped at the first heavy thrust. “There’s absolutely nothing soft about you.”

  Late the next morning, Tommy smiled up at Kate as she padded barefoot into the kitchen dressed in another one of his T-shirts that hung almost to her knees. Kate, seeing he was on the phone, gave him a silent wave and made a beeline for the coffeepot.

  “So she can’t even give you any basic details,” Tommy said, refocusing his attention on his conversation with Jackson, who had called with the news that while Tricia had woken up and was lucid enough for CJ to question her briefly, she couldn’t remember anything in enough detail to give a good description of her kidnapper.

  “All she can give us is that he’s on the tall side, strong build.”

  Tommy bit back a curse. “That could be anyone. Including the guy who jumped Kate. Hopefully more will come back to her. In the meantime, I’ll start digging into the company that bought that property. If we dig deep enough, we’re bound to uncover the real owner. That will at least give us a place to start.”

  “How long do you think that will take you?”

  Tommy grimaced. “A couple hours? A couple days? It all depends on how committed this guy is to covering his tracks.”

  Jackson handed the phone to CJ, who cautioned Tommy about getting too far on the side of illegal in his searches. “We can’t use anything like that as evidence.”

  To Tommy, it was a familiar refrain, but one that never failed to annoy him. “If it points you in the right direction and you do your job right, you’ll come up with plenty of your own evidence.”

  CJ gave a noncommittal grunt. “Let me know if you find anything, but keep the methods to yourself,” he said, and rang off.

  Tommy snagged Kate around the waist as she walked by and pulled her down into his lap and gave her a proper good morning kiss.

  “Was that CJ?” she asked when he came up for air.

  “And Jackson.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “And?”

  “Got kind of a good-news, bad-news situation here,” he said, and relayed what Jackson had shared.

  She let out a relieved sigh. “Thank God she’s recovering. That’s the most important thing.”

  “Agreed, but it would be nice to find the fuck who terrorized her and nail him to the wall.”

  “Ooh, I love it when you get all fierce and protective,” Kate teased, and squirmed playfully on his lap.

  Already half hard when she’d strolled into the kitchen, Tommy sprang immediately to full, screaming readiness at the feel of that firm little ass nestled against his groin. He gave her another hungry kiss but pulled away before things could go any farther. “As much as I’d like to spend the day in bed with you, I promised Jackson I’d get to work finding out who bought the land where Tricia was found.”

  Kate made a little sound of regret but didn’t protest. “You’re right, finding the kidnapper has to be our priority. We can’t let ourselves get carried away.” She started to walk out of the kitchen and paused. “Speaking of which, we need to keep what’s happening between us under the radar for a while.”

  Tommy’s hackles instinctively raised. He didn’t know why, but it was like suddenly his nineteen-year-old self came roaring to life, the wounds of losing her still fresh and raw. “What? Afraid of the scandal it will cause when the press finds out the senator’s daughter is fucking a lowly rancher’s son?”

  He regretted the words the second they left his mouth, and the way Kate flinched at his crudeness didn’t help.

  Before he could apologize, Kate stormed over and got in his face, looking as tough as it was possible for a petitely built woman dressed only in a T-shirt. “Of course I’m not embarrassed or ashamed to be with you. It’s just that after everything that’s happened, I can’t afford for my sex life to be front and center again. This isn’t just about my reputation, it’s my entire career. Even more important, the focus needs to be on Tricia and finding her kidnapper, not on me and who I’m sleeping with.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tommy said, feeling about two inches big. “I don’t even know where that came from.” He reached out and pulled her stiff body into his arms, relieved when, after a few breaths, she melted into him once again. “We’ll keep it on the down low as long as you want.”

  Kate smiled up at him. “Fourteen years later and here we are sneaking around again.” Then her smile faded, shadows of painful memories darkening her blue eyes.

  “Something tells me it’s going to work out better this time around.”

  Fifteen minutes later Tommy dropped her off at her townhouse, refusing to leave until he’d done a thorough search, set the alarm, and heard the dead bolt thunk into place behind him. He was heading back to his truck when a female voice called his name.

  He didn’t need to turn around to know it was the reporter who seemed to have it in for Kate. Tommy didn’t even bother to turn around when she called
his name again.

  “Please, Mr. Ibarra, I know you’ve been helping on Tricia Fuller’s kidnapping, that you were part of the search party who found her.”

  Tommy paused, his truck door halfway open as he looked at the woman. She was accompanied by a scruffy-looking guy with a camera on his shoulder. “I can’t comment, but I’m sure Sheriff Kovac will be happy to answer your questions at the next press conference.”

  “What about your relationship with Kate Beckett? Can you comment on that?”

  Shit. Tommy schooled his face into an expressionless mask. “Kate and I have collaborated with the local authorities to find Tricia.”

  He started to get in his truck.

  “Please, you can’t think your sexual relationship with her has remained a secret.”

  Tommy’s fingers tightened around the door frame and he cursed himself for engaging with this bitch in the first place. “Whether or not I’m having sex with Kate Beckett has no bearing on Tricia’s disappearance and rescue. Kate has been an invaluable resource and a comfort to the family. You should be focusing on that.”

  “But you can’t deny that she seems to make a habit of getting involved with men she’s working with on these high-profile cases.”

  “I’d hardly call two a habit,” he muttered before he could stop himself. His stomach sank as a hard light came into Walsh’s eyes. It was a look he knew all too well. The look of a predator going in for the kill.

  After Tommy left, Kate showered, dressed, and headed over to the hospital to check on Tricia. Though she was cleared to drive, she opted to walk to the hospital. The weather was beautiful, in the low eighties, the sky the kind of crazy azure blue shade you could only see in the mountains. Not to mention the walk would help her work some of the kinks out of her sore hip as well as all the newly rediscovered muscles that had gotten such a vigorous workout the night before.