He paused, and Nicky realized that all of a sudden she could feel his heart beating beneath her hand. A long moment passed before he went on.
“Anyway, like you said, the bust was all set up. We were going to take down the cops who were taking the payoffs and the drug traffickers all at the same time, and confiscate five million dollars in drug money and five million dollars’ worth of cocaine to boot. It was going to be sweet, we thought. And it should have been. Only Brian, the son of a bitch, sold me out. He told Lee Martinez—he was the local drug kingpin we were getting ready to bust—that I was undercover DEA. We were all in the warehouse with these trucks loaded with coke, waiting for the guys with the money to get there. Agents were outside, watching for the money guys to come, because that’s when they were going to make the bust. We had just found out the location that day, so there was no time to set up any internal surveillance. The arrival of the money guys was supposed to be the signal. So we were all just waiting, there inside the warehouse, all kind of antsy, when I got the word that Martinez wanted to see me in his little office at the back. Soon as I got in there and saw that Brian was in there with this stupid little smirk he always got when he thought he’d outsmarted somebody, I knew I had trouble, and sure enough, Martinez’s thugs jumped me. Searched me for a wire, which I wasn’t wearing because Martinez was such a paranoid son of a bitch, you never could tell when he was going to get suspicious of somebody and have them searched. So there I was, on my knees, cuffed, with a gun to my head, when they brought in Gina. She was tied to one of those rolling chairs, and there was duct tape over her mouth. She was crying, no sound but big tears running down her cheeks.”
He broke off. His heart was thudding beneath her hand now. Nicky could feel it beating like a piston. His body was rigid against her, with tension emanating from him as palpably as body heat. He took a deep breath, blew it out, and went on.
“I’ll give Brian this. He looked surprised, like he hadn’t known Gina was there. See, that was the thing about Brian. The piece of shit had this positive genius for getting stuff started that in the end blew up in his face. Brian didn’t know any details about the operation we were running, ’cause I hadn’t told him. He didn’t know, for example, that the bust was going down that very night. All he was able to tell them was that I was working undercover for the DEA. So Martinez and his goons thought that they would use Gina as leverage to get the lowdown on what the feds were up to out of me. And it worked. They started making little cuts on her face with a knife, and she was just bucking and crying in that chair, and you better believe I sang like a bird. Of course, it was all lies. I was lying, and praying the whole time that the money guys would get there, that the bust would go down in time. It didn’t happen. Martinez must have gotten tired of hearing me talk, or else time just ran out for some reason, because he kicked me in the stomach to shut me up, and then somebody else hit me over the head with something that knocked me for a loop. I was down on the ground, not quite unconscious, trying to hang on, knowing that any minute the feds would be busting down the doors. Then I heard Martinez say to Brian, ‘You brought him in here, you fuck-up, you whack him,’ and I felt a gun against my temple. I kind of got one eye open and looked up, and there was Brian, standing over me, getting ready to pull the trigger. He was sweating bullets, looking scared enough to piss himself, and I remember thinking, You asshole, you don’t have the balls. Then, damn, he did it.”
Joe’s voice broke off and he closed his eyes. Nicky lay frozen with horror, unable to speak, unable to move. After a moment, opening his eyes again, he continued in a voice so soft that she had to strain to hear it.
“I should have been dead. I was probably about as close as you can get and not go on and die. I know Martinez and his goons must have thought I was dead. The funny thing is, after the bust was over, when the paramedics came in and were working on me, I sort of came to or something for a couple of minutes and saw everything that was going on in that office. It was like I was looking down on the action from the ceiling, and I could just see it all real clearly. Everybody in there was dead. Martinez and his thugs, Brian, Gina.”
He paused, took a breath, and Nicky realized that her own heart was pounding right along with his.
“Gina, still tied to that chair. Covered in blood, bullet through the head.” His voice was raw, and Nicky’s heart ached for him. “I learned later that the money guys had arrived and the feds had come roaring in right after Brian had shot me, and Martinez and his thugs had started shooting. Nine people ended up dead.” He took a breath. “Out of everyone in that office, I was the only one to come out alive.”
He quit talking and sucked in air. He lay there, one arm tucked behind his head, the other wrapped around her. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. She could feel his racing heart, feel how hard he was trying to control his emotions by the unyielding rigidity of his body. He was breathing in a slow, steady rhythm, and she realized that he was deliberately controlling that, too.
“As soon as I could, I flew to California to check on Jeff, who was living with his dad. Just to make sure, you know, that he was okay. He was playing out in the front yard of this two-story brick house when I got there, everything looking good, so I walked across the grass to say hi. He looked up at me and got this really scared look on his face and said, ‘You got my mom killed. Go away!’ and ran inside the house. I don’t blame the kid: He was right. His dad came rushing out, and I could see Jeff was fine, so I left. Went back to Trenton, found out that I was stuck with being labeled a ‘dirty cop’ until the feds finished their investigation up there, which at this point is looking like it’s going to take years, and got some strings pulled on my behalf so that I could get this job down here.” He paused and took a breath. “So there you have it: the story of how a Jersey vice cop wound up as a police chief in paradise.”
The slightly mocking tone in which he said that last sentence couldn’t disguise his underlying pain. Nicky could feel it in his knocking heart, in the tension in his muscles, in the hardness of the arm around her. She could see it in the taut line of his jaw and the way he continued to focus on the ceiling instead of looking at her.
He didn’t want to look at her because he didn’t want her to be able to read the emotion in his eyes. And she realized that underneath the calm, capable exterior of this very adult man still lurked that lonely, scared but determinedly macho boy.
She realized, too, that tears were stinging her eyes—that she cared.
“Joe.” She slithered on top of him, propped herself on her forearms, and framed his face with her hands. He met her gaze then. His hands slid down her back to rest lightly at her waist. The pillow beneath his head meant that their eyes were almost level. His cheeks were warm and faintly prickly beneath her palms. His body felt very solid and strong beneath her, and she could feel the hard wall of his chest beneath her breasts, rising and falling as he breathed. Below his boxers, his legs were hard with muscle and rough with hair.
She stroked his cheek. “It wasn’t your fault, what happened to Gina.”
“Yeah,” he said, and his voice was raw and thick. “It was.”
The moonlight filtering over the bed allowed her to see what she had already known would be there in his eyes: a deep, atavistic suffering that no words had the power to soothe. The guilt and grief were a burden he would carry with him as long as he lived, she knew.
Her throat constricted. The knowledge that he was hurting hurt her.
“Hey,” he said, in a near approximation of his normal voice. “Are those tears? Tell me you’re not crying.”
Nicky swallowed. Clearly no sympathy was going to be allowed. Of course, big, bad cops didn’t wallow in emotion. They sucked it up and got on with life.
“No, of course not.” Nicky’s hands retreated from his face to his broad, bare shoulders. She resisted the urge to sniffle or try to blink back the tears that she knew were on the brink of spilling from her eyes for fear that doing either would make them even m
ore obvious. The thing was, she discovered, she just couldn’t stand to think of him in such emotional pain, whether he wanted her sympathy or not.
“Liar.” His eyes glinted at her. She thought she detected something like tenderness in his voice.
“So what if I am?” she said, goaded into glaring at him through the film of tears that she couldn’t hide. “I feel bad for you, okay?”
“The thing is”—he smiled at her, a sweet and charming smile the likes of which she’d never seen on his face before—“I don’t think anybody’s ever cried over me before. And you know what?” He rolled with her, pinning her beneath him in a tangle of limbs and covers. “I like it.”
Then he kissed her, licking into her mouth, and heat exploded inside her like a supernova.
His mouth was hot and wet and his body was hot and hard, and Nicky wrapped her arms around his neck and closed her eyes and kissed him back with an intensity that made her dizzy. Her flimsy nightgown was rucked up around the tops of her thighs, and she had nothing on beneath, which meant that she was all but naked. His weight pressed her down into the mattress. His body heat seeped into her pores. One of his legs was wedged between hers, and the steely muscles of his thigh pressing against her most intimate flesh made her body quake and burn. His hand slid between their bodies. It felt big and warm through her thin nightgown, and when it closed over her breast, she shivered a little. He caressed her through the silky cloth, running his thumb over her nipple, and she arched up against his hand and pressed her nails into his shoulders and squeezed his thigh with hers, suddenly so turned on that she felt as though she was melting inside.
He broke off the kiss, lifting his head.
“Joe.” It was a murmur of protest. Breathing way too fast, Nicky opened her eyes and looked up at him. He was looming over her, the hard, handsome planes of his face and the broad outline of his shoulders silvered by moonlight, and she could see the hot, dark gleam of his eyes, the sensuous curve of his mouth. His hand looked very big and dark against her ivory gown. The fact that it was curved over her breast made her mouth go dry.
“Remember how I said I don’t do relationships?” His voice sounded surprisingly normal, especially given the fact that she was practically breathless with desire. Then she remembered: This was a man who kept his emotions under control.
“Vividly,” she answered, striving for a light note, although she was on fire for him, burning for him, wanting him with a passion that was making her heart pound and her toes curl and her body throb. His leg moved so that his hard, hot thigh was pressing even tighter against her, and it was all she could do not to squirm with pleasure.
“I was wrong,” he said, his voice a little huskier now, and slid his mouth down her throat. Her skin, she discovered, was sensitive, so incredibly sensitive that the hot, wet glide of Joe’s mouth moving over it made her shiver with delight. “I want a relationship. With you.”
“You sure you’re ready for this?” It was hard to inject a dry note into her voice when he was tracing the lacy neckline of her nightgown with hot little kisses pressed into her exquisitely receptive skin and rubbing his thigh against her and caressing her breast all at the same time, but she managed. He wasn’t the only one who could be cool under pressure. “Pardon me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the guy who said, ‘Having sex once does not make a relationship’?”
“I figured you’d still be huffy about that. It’s that red hair.” Joe lifted his head and smiled at her. If it hadn’t been for the hot, dark glitter of his eyes and the unmistakable evidence of his desire that she could feel pressing hard and urgent against her, she might have been fooled into thinking he was as unruffled as he sounded. “Anyway, this will be twice.”
Then his head dipped and his mouth found her breast, her nipple. It was wet and scalding hot through the thin cloth as he suckled first one breast, then the other. Nicky caught her breath. Her body surged against that sinewy thigh, sending shock waves of pleasure through her system.
“What if I don’t want a relationship?” It was difficult to talk, much less make sense, when her heart was pounding and her blood was racing and her body was quivering with sensation. She slid her hands down over the warm, damp skin of his back, loving the blatant masculinity of it, the feel of strong muscles flexing beneath sleek skin. Her fingertips encountered the waistband of his shorts and slipped inside.
He lifted his head from the exquisite torture he was inflicting on her breasts to look at her. “You’d break my heart.”
She would have been fooled by the almost whimsical tone of that statement if his eyes hadn’t been fierce and black.
“Joe,” she said, which he clearly took to mean yes to a relationship because he kissed her, gently at first and then with ferocious need. Nicky kissed him back, wildly, passionately, bursting into flames as his hands slid over her, pulling her slinky nightgown over her head, leaving her naked and vulnerable as he caressed her everywhere, kissing and touching until finally, because patience had never been her strong suit and she was really tired of waiting, she pushed his boxers down his legs and closed her mouth around him and did to him what he had been doing to her.
“Christ,” he said. Then, “Nicky.”
Then he rolled her over and came into her, just like that, enormous and hot, plunging deep inside her so that she gasped and clung to him, moving with him as he loved her with a torrid eroticism that made her shiver and burn and cry out again and again and again. Finally, he drove inside her with a series of fierce, deep thrusts and she came, just like that, exploding in fiery starbursts of passion, digging her nails into his back and wrapping her legs around his waist and gasping out his name.
“Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe.”
“Nicky,” he groaned in answer, holding himself deep inside her shaking body, shuddering as he found his own release.
Afterward, she lay spent in his arms, warm and relaxed and sleepy, and listened to the deep, steady rhythm of his breathing. He felt hot and faintly sweaty and big and solid and altogether good against her. Her head was on his shoulder, and she tilted her chin so that she could look up at him. What she saw was the lean angle of a stubbled jaw, the sensuous curve of slightly parted lips, the sweep of dark lashes against his cheeks, the hard curve of his cheekbones—and, above, bisecting his temple, the pale, puckered lines of the scars where he’d been shot.
And her gut clenched like a giant hand had reached right inside her body and grabbed it and twisted.
Even as his lashes lifted and his eyes gleamed down at her, she had another one of her patented eureka moments.
I’m in love with you, Joe Franconi, she thought with a spurt of half-terrified wonder. And I have absolutely no intention in the world of telling you so.
22
AT ABOUT FIVE a.m., Nicky was so tired that she actually fell asleep—deeply, dreamlessly asleep, not the little twenty-minute dozes she’d been drifting into between lovemaking sessions all night. By the time she zonked out, Joe’s twice had been long since left in the dust. If his standard of measurement was any indication, they now definitely had a relationship going on.
And she still hadn’t told him that she was in love with him. That was a secret she meant to guard until she was sure the words wouldn’t send him racing for the nearest exit. At the moment, she sensed that just committing to an ambiguously defined “relationship” was as far as he was prepared to go.
Not that she was particularly unhappy about it. She recognized that he saw an enormous risk when he thought about letting someone into his heart. She was willing to give him some time—and anyway, she needed time herself to make sure that this wasn’t just some stress- and lust-induced aberration.
But she didn’t think it was. It felt like—gulp—the real thing.
Which was a scary thought all by itself. Making things worse was the fact that the last Twenty-four Hours Investigates broadcast would be over soon, which meant that soon—not immediately, because she wanted to stay around until Livvy was out
of the hospital at least, but soon—she would be leaving Pawleys Island. Whatever happened with the show, or with Live in the Morning or any other gig she might be offered, her work was elsewhere. She simply couldn’t stay.
She could visit, though, and she would, frequently, because she meant to keep looking for the bastard who had attacked Livvy until he was caught or she died, plain and simple. And also—she would visit for Joe.
She wondered how he felt about commuter relationships. One thing she could be sure of was that as soon as it occurred to him that she would be leaving soon, she was going to find out.
By the time she woke up, it was nine a.m. and she was alone. She glanced around the bedroom, a little warily because she was just then remembering Brian, but there was no ghost in sight. No Joe, either. That being the case, and since the day in front of her was jam-packed with things she absolutely had to do, she rolled out of bed.
In the bathroom, she took one look in the mirror and nearly shrieked. Forget about love’s rosy glow. She had bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, and there was whisker burn—yes, definitely whisker burn—on her cheeks. And was that a hickey at the base of her throat? Ohmigod, it was. And she had to be on live TV tonight.
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