by Julie Miller
He shrugged out of his jacket and wrapped it around her. Elise shivered at the shock of his scent and lingering body heat sliding over her chilled skin.
“There was a man in my house.” She sounded like a worn-out recording.
“I know.” George pulled the paint tarp off her sofa and tossed it to the floor. He unloaded the two end tables she’d stored on top of the cushions before he took her hand and urged her to sit.
“I think he let Spike get out the door when he came in. Or else he put him out on purpose.” It was the only scenario that made sense. If any of this made sense. Elise clutched the suit jacket together over her dress, shaking at the knowledge of what could have happened to her if she’d met him face-to-face. “He was in my bedroom.”
The cushion beside her sank and her balance shifted as George sat down. “I believe you.”
“Even if there’s no evidence?” Elise glanced up to see if he was simply trying to placate her the way Officer Hale had. “The doors were locked. And nothing’s missing.”
“You may have scared him off before he had a chance to take anything. And a barking dog changes a lot of intruders’ minds.” He pulled both her hands between his and gently rubbed them. “Besides, you’re too cold for me to doubt you. That means you had a real shock. It happened.”
George Madigan’s matter-of-fact tone did more to make her feel safe than two armed police officers and a robotic sounding dispatcher had. His simple statement of faith in her sanity swept out the cobwebs of self-doubt and touched her bruised heart.
Curling her legs beneath her, Elise pushed herself up, looping her arms about George’s neck, knocking him into the back of the couch. “Thank you.”
“For what...?” After a momentary hesitation, his chest expanded with a deep breath, meeting hers. When he exhaled, there was no more gap between them. He folded his arms around her, flattening one hand against her spine to anchor her to his body. He pushed aside the jacket’s collar and threaded his fingers into the short hair at her nape to massage the tension in her neck. “You’re okay. You’re safe now. No one’s going to hurt you.”
Elise turned her cheek into the soft rasp of his evening beard stubble, feeling the vibration of his deep voice against her ear. Her own fingertips brushed against the dark silk of his hair as she rode each measured breath on his chest, absorbing his heat. George was solid and real. There was no mistaking this vital, caring man for a figment of her imagination. “I almost wish they would.”
“Hurt you? I’m going to disagree with that idea, if you don’t mind.”
“But all this is making me think I’m going crazy. There are too many things that I can’t explain.” He took the edge off her raw nerves with his calm voice and soothing massage. “I’m not crazy. I’m not.”
“What do you mean by ‘all this’?” His fingers stilled when she shook her head, reluctant to answer. He unwound her arms from his neck and let her slide down onto his lap. Pulling the jacket back over her shoulders, he urged her grasping hands to settle at the lapels. Once she was holding the coat together at her neck, George brushed the hair off her forehead and pressed his lips against the spot. “Talk to me.”
It was the gentlest of kisses, and maybe the most dangerous. Because, while a lingering kiss to the forehead was soothing, patient, kind—the caress also gave her a glimpse of what George’s lips might feel like against hers. They were firm. Masculine. Pure, incandescent heat. She had a feeling that a man of his experience might know exactly what to do with those lips, too.
Elise’s breath locked in her chest at the desire suddenly humming between them. Her fingers slipped from the jacket to the starched crispness of his unbuttoned collar. “George?” she breathed.
“Beats sir.” For a split second, his gray eyes locked on to hers. They were so close, she could read every hue of granite, smoke and steel in the irises there. Then his gaze dropped lower, to her mouth, and a deep-pitched groan rumbled beneath her hands.
George dipped his head, touching his mouth to hers, kindling a slow, liquid fire in Elise’s blood that chased away the chill of doubt and fear. The kiss was as tender as the graze across her forehead had been. A simple meeting of skin against skin. At first.
When she didn’t resist, George’s lips urged hers apart. His warm breath rushed in to mingle with hers. Elise’s fingers fisted in his shirt. Her tongue darted out to sample the smooth, male plane of his bottom lip, and his own tongue forced hers back to taste the soft skin inside her mouth. The cold she’d felt moments earlier shattered with bursts of heat inside her belly and at the tips of her breasts.
It was, by far, the most potent, most surprising, most spontaneous response she’d ever had to a man’s kiss. Every place they touched—her lips, her earlobes and neck where he held her against his mouth, her fingers clinging to the muscles of his chest, her hip and bottom nestled against his thighs—was on fire.
And that’s when the alarm bells went off inside her head and she knew she had to stop. She eased her grip on George’s collar and pushed at his chin, leaning back when he moved to resume the kiss. “What are you doing?” she asked on a throaty whisper.
George’s fingers tensed before he untangled them from her hair. “I’m more rusty at this than I thought if you have to ask.”
She’d loved Quinn Gallagher with hopeless devotion. She’d given herself to Nikolai Titov out of loneliness and lust. But this was different. She’d never felt this alive, this desired, this needy in a man’s arms before. And if anything frightened her, it was the knowledge that she could very easily fall for George Madigan—for the wrong man—all over again. “I...I can’t. We can’t.”
“My mistake.” His eyes shuttered as he moved his hands to her waist and lifted her off his lap. Elise landed on the seat cushion beside him, catching herself before she tumbled back into his side.
“No. I was a part of that as much as you were. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking for a minute there. I was just...scared.” She pointed to his grim expression, then to her own shaky smile. “Boss, assistant—remember?” He might think she was quoting departmental protocol, but reminding herself of the hazards of getting into a relationship with this man was more a matter of her own emotional survival. “I shouldn’t have encouraged you—”
“What else has happened besides the intruder and the mystery of the roses?” George’s tone was as sharply articulate and impersonal as it had been hushed and indulgent moments earlier.
Although the worst of the spooky chill that had numbed her of self-sufficiency and common sense had dissipated inside George’s embrace, Elise reluctantly shrugged his jacket off her shoulders. She folded it neatly in her lap to return to him, fearing it was too much of an imposition to reject his kiss, yet still ask for his comfort. “George. It’s not you. It’s—”
“What else has happened?” So they weren’t going to talk about that kiss. Because this, whatever it was, didn’t—couldn’t—exist between them. She’d said as much to him this morning. George rolled up his sleeves, literally and figuratively transforming himself into work mode. He nodded at the dog sitting at his feet, staring at them as if he wanted the people to make room for him on the crowded couch. “So this is the guy on your desk at work. What’s his name?”
“Spike.”
“Is he friendly?” Elise nodded, holding out the suit coat to return to him.
Instead of accepting the jacket, George reached down with one hand to scoop up the miniature poodle mix and set him on her lap. Spike immediately curled up on George’s jacket and made himself at home. Elise would have tried to protect the coat if George wasn’t already scratching the spoiled dog around his ears and making an instant friend. She tried to ignore the warmth of George’s hip and thigh butting against hers. She tried to make sense of the mature, no-nonsense cop wooing her closest ally. She tried to dismiss the confusing emotions warring i
nside her.
George was her boss, fourteen years her senior, a workaholic like herself. He carried weighty responsibilities on his shoulders. Responsibilities she’d sworn to support. Not the man she would have chosen to be so viscerally attracted to.
It was her talent to form relationships with the wrong men. And while she believed George was a good man, he wasn’t the man for her and she would certainly get hurt again.
He was her friend. There were few people she trusted so implicitly. She didn’t want to screw that up.
She needed him to ground her in the current, crazy chaos of her life with his decisive words and stalwart support.
She wanted him to kiss her again.
George caught her staring at him when he lifted his stony gaze to hers. Understandably, he misread her silence as a reluctance to share the details of the past few days. “If you won’t talk to me, then tell Spike what’s going on.”
The man was dead serious. Elise dropped her gaze from those probing eyes and stroked the silky curls of Spike’s hair. “I can’t explain any of it.”
“Yes, you can.”
Boss. Friend. Security. George Madigan was all those things. It was enough.
And with nothing more than a relaxed little dog binding them together, Elise talked. She told George about the significance of twenty-three roses, how her affair with Nikolai Titov had lasted twenty-three days before he’d been deported to Lukinburg and was murdered. He already knew about Titov’s vendetta against her former boss, Quinn Gallagher, but he listened patiently when she told him how she’d unwittingly given Titov and his hit squad access to information on GSS Security and Quinn’s personal schedule. And though she’d never met Aleksandr Titov, the fact that Nikolai’s brother had come to Kansas City was a little unsettling. She talked about the house key and how the police officers had found it in its box as if the thing had never gone missing at all. She talked about the dog greeting her in the front yard, and the crash and footsteps they’d heard upstairs. She reminded George that no one else had seen the key missing or heard the weird phone call in her office. No one could prove that the very same bouquet she’d taken to the hospital had been returned to her desk or she hadn’t left Spike outside herself or that there had ever been an intruder in her home.
When she was done, Elise hugged the dog against her chest. “At least you’re okay, sweetie. You could have been hit by a car, running loose like that. Or gotten heatstroke.”
George moved to the edge of the couch, turning to face her. “Someone’s trying to scare you.”
“They’re succeeding.”
“Any idea why? Could someone be trying to discredit you for some reason? Got any old boyfriends you’ve ticked off?”
She shook her head. “That’s the scariest part—I have no idea why these things are happening to me. I mean, what’s the point?”
George pushed to his feet. “You haven’t been yourself the past couple of days. If nothing else, these mind games have disrupted the efficiency of my office.”
Elise cradled Spike in her arms and stood. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not worried about you doing your job. Even on your worst day you get more done than any assistant I’ve had.” He picked his suit jacket up off the floor and shook it open. “I’m throwing out a possible motive. Budget shortfalls and increased demand for trained personnel don’t make me a popular man.”
“I would never let anything happen that could impact KCPD or the deputy commissioner’s office.” She wouldn’t betray the people she worked with ever again. “After what happened with Quinn Gallagher, I keep my job and my private life separate.”
“You and Quinn?” He paused in the middle of buttoning his shirt cuff. His gray eyes zeroed in on her. She hadn’t confessed to unrequited love and heartbreak. But maybe George was reading between the lines of the story she’d told. “That explains a lot.”
Maybe it was all the explanation he needed to dismiss that kiss. Maybe she should dismiss it, too. But he’d seemed so...insulted that she had.
“George. I truly am...attracted to you, and I value our friendship. But there are a lot of reasons why we can’t—”
But Elise never got to finish. Her front door opened and James Westbrook stormed in. “Lise? Baby, what happened? Are you okay?” He brushed off the police officer who tried to stop him. “Let go of me.”
Denton Hale caught James firmly by the arm this time and pulled him back into the archway. “I’m sorry, sir. Since you were here, I didn’t think to relock the door. I saw him from across the street and tried to stop him before he got in. He says he’s a friend of Miss Brown’s.”
James jerked his arm free and took a step closer. “I am a friend. Lise, tell them.”
George took his time shrugging into his jacket and adjusting his cuffs, planting himself in the middle of the room’s narrow pathway. James would have to climb over paint cans and sawhorses if he wanted to get any closer to her. “Is Miss Brown expecting you?” he asked.
“No,” Elise answered. “Why are you here?”
“Lise!” James’s gaze darted from Elise to George and back to her. With a noisy sigh, he stayed where he was and held up a bundle of letters and ad flyers. “Your mailbox was open out front. So I brought it in for you. What’s with all the cops?”
“Answer her question,” George insisted.
Concern morphed into anger in James’s expression. “I’m not talking to you.”
“Answer...the question.”
“I knew you were upset last night so I came over to take you to dinner and apologize. As friends.” James negated the sincerity of his apology by glaring through his glasses at her around the jut of George’s shoulder. “Who is this guy? Is he why you’ve been avoiding me?”
Elise touched George’s arm to nudge him over a step so she could stand beside him. When her fingers lingered against the summer-weight wool of his sleeve, James’s gaze landed on the spot and she quickly pulled away. “Someone broke in, but nothing was taken and I’m not hurt. This is the man I work for at KCPD, George Madigan. Deputy Commissioner, this is James Westbrook.”
James seemed to calm down as if the hot air of his temper was a balloon that had suddenly popped. “Oh. Your boss. Good to meet you.”
Although George shook the hand James offered, he was already backing James toward the foyer. “I’ll walk you out.”
But when they reached the door, James splayed his fingers at the waist of his pressed jeans and held his ground. “Is there some reason why I can’t stay? We can order a pizza. We don’t have to go out.”
Elise followed the three men into the foyer. “I’m really tired, James. I’d be lousy company.”
There was a momentary glitch in the diplomatic charm of his blue eyes. “I’ll take a rain check, then.” He handed Elise her mail, palmed Spike’s head and leaned in to kiss her cheek. “Be sure you lock your doors. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. Call you tomorrow?”
Whatever. She had no energy left to say even a polite no. “Good night, James.”
With an order to Officer Hale to escort the unwanted guest back to his car, George pushed the door shut, leaning against it and crossing his arms. “He’s the guy I alibied you out for, isn’t he.”
There was no avoiding that probing gaze. “We used to date. Years ago. We went our separate ways by mutual agreement.”
“Does he know that? That you’re not interested?”
“He’s lived overseas for several years. Now that he’s back in Kansas City, he doesn’t know that many people. He’s just looking for companionship.” George’s eyes never wavered, never blinked. Elise bristled with a shot of defensive anger. “You don’t think James is behind this craziness, do you? He’s more likely to pester me into saying yes to him than he is to terrorize me.”
Those broad sho
ulders lifted with a shrug. “I’ve dealt with crazier scenarios. Maybe he thought you’d get scared enough that you’d turn to him for comfort.”
“James doesn’t make me feel safe. You...”
The moment of anger passed on a noiseless sigh and Elise dropped her gaze to the middle of his chest. She’d already shared way too much of her personal life for the impersonal relationship she claimed to want.
“I do.” George straightened away from the door, nodding as if she’d spoken the words out loud. “Okay. Then here’s what we do. Call someone to change this lock first thing in the morning. I’ll post a black-and-white unit outside tonight.”
“The city can’t afford to dedicate a unit just for me. You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I do. It’s my job to allocate funds and personnel where they’re needed most. They’re needed here tonight.” She recognized that tone, the one that said I’m in charge and what I say goes.
“No.” Whether she was really thinking about the common good or if she was distancing herself from the temptation of letting this powerful man take care of her, of letting him become even more involved in her life, she wasn’t sure. But she protested, anyway. “Think of the resentment. Officers like Denton Hale are already worried about their next paycheck. With the increased power demands, the city is struggling to make ends meet. You can’t just order someone to babysit me because a few weird things have happened. The police have more important jobs to do right now.”
“A trespasser in your house is a real crime, Elise.”
“But attacks on utility workers are more important.”
“You’re important.” With her arms full of dog and mail, he reached out to brush aside a loose wave of hair that had fallen over her cheek. “All right. I’ll work something else out. But I need you to be safe, Elise. You’re too valuable to me.”