The Baby Mission

by Marie Ferrarella

  His tongue trailed along her belly, making it quiver in anticipation. She felt herself ripening for him to the point that she didn’t think she could stand it a moment longer.

  And then, after anointing each thigh in slow, moist strokes, he found the very core of her.

  C.J. moaned something almost unintelligible, her body separating from her mind as an avalanche of sensations thundered all through her.

  First one wave hit and then another. She felt like a wild animal, glorying in the pleasure, but wanting him to be with her.

  Summoning strength from some nether region, C.J. drew herself up, pushing him away just far enough to be able to slide her legs back around his torso.

  She pulled him to her, teasing him with her body, her invitation clear. Her mouth sealed to his.

  The next moment she was flat against the table again with Warrick looming over her, like a lord over a slave.

  But this wasn’t about control, about power. It was only about pleasure. About giving.

  “Now.”

  It was half an order, half a plea, the single word dragged along her raw throat.

  She thought she heard him murmur, “Yes, ma’am.” Thought she felt his smile against her skin, but she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she wanted him. Despite the climaxes he had given her, she wanted him, wanted to join with him the way it was always meant to be.

  Wanted Warrick to feel the jarring power the way she had.

  This time, when he entered her, she was the one who initiated the rhythm. At least the first step. The rest of the dance he led, taking her with him every step of the way.

  Her breathing became erratic, or maybe she stopped breathing altogether. She wasn’t sure.

  Nothing mattered except climbing up to the summit together.

  And then the explosion reached her, shaking her body. She dug her nails into his back, glorying in the feel of him, in the moment they shared, her heart hammering so hard she was certain it would take a team of cardiac surgeons to return it to its rightful place.

  She didn’t care.

  C.J. kept her eyes closed, lost in the swirls of sensations that were settling all over her. Lost in the feel of him, of the length of his body covering hers.

  How was he managing that without crushing her?

  She opened her eyes and realized that he was raised on his elbows, balancing his weight, looking down into her face.

  He kissed her lips softly.

  She almost felt shy. How was that possible? What was he doing to her? She felt as if she’d been turned inside out and then back again.

  And wanted more.

  “Definitely more stimulating than coffee,” he whispered against her ear.

  The next moment he was rising up, then getting off the table. He took her hand, helping her up.

  C.J. felt a little woozy as she sat up. She must have swayed, because she felt his arms closing around her protectively. She loved the feel of his hard chest against her.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded, or thought she did. C.J. put her hand to her head, as if that would still the room and put the world back into focus.

  “Just a little adrenaline rush. I think the blood totally drained out of my head.” Taking a deep breath, she hopped off the table. He drew her to him, closing his arms around her. C.J. leaned her cheek against him. She felt safe, protected. Happy. She looked at the table. “You realize, of course, that I’m going to have to burn that now.”

  He tilted her head back a little, smiling into her eyes. “Funny, I was thinking of having it bronzed, myself.”

  “A trophy?”

  That sounded much too harsh, much too cold. Neither had any place here. “A keepsake,” he corrected.

  It was a silly word. But it still managed to warm her heart.

  The next moment she felt herself being swept off the floor and up into his arms. “I’d like to see your bedroom now.”

  She’d half expected him to say something about the hour and needing to get home. C.J. smiled as she laced her arms around his neck. “First door to your right.”

  “And straight out to morning.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, just paraphrasing Peter Pan’s flight plan to Neverland.”

  Never. The word she’d used when thinking of falling in love. Never. The word that didn’t work anymore. Nerves moved through her, cautioning her not to say anything. Not to ruin the moment. Not to expect what couldn’t be.

  “Are you planning on flying tonight?” she asked as he took the stairs.

  Warrick brushed a kiss against her hair. “I already have. But the plane isn’t grounded yet.”

  “Big words,” she teased.

  He came to the landing. “I never say anything I don’t mean.”

  He stared at the house.

  They were inside. Claire and that man. He’d seen them walk in. He’d sneaked out of his apartment, using his secret route through the old basement that linked to the next house.

  No one saw him.

  But he saw them. Saw them watching him.

  Tag, they were it.

  But he didn’t have time to play. Not now, not when everything inside him hurt so bad.

  She was doing it again, just like the last time. She was giving herself to someone else when she should have been his. Would have been his.

  He had to claim her again, just as he had the last time. And the time before that.

  He needed to save her. Before she became any more spoiled.

  He settled into the shadows of the greenbelt, watching the house. His fingers rubbed the pearls on the necklace in his pocket.

  Chapter 14

  As the mists of contentment began to fade away, Warrick slowly became aware of something else hovering in the recesses of his mind. A small, nagging sensation that had been steadily nibbling away at him, taking tiny bites out of the fabric of his resolve with sharp, steely teeth.

  He recognized it for what it was. Fear.

  Not the kind of energizing fear that accompanied him into darkened alleys, stood beside him in confrontations with thieves and killers who could end life as he knew it in the blink of an eye if he so much as let a fraction of his guard down. That fear helped keep him alive.

  This fear ate away at the lining of his stomach.

  This fear had to do with C.J. And what she was doing to his world.

  It was as if, no matter how alert he was, he had no control, no say over what was happening to him. He didn’t like it. It made him uneasy. At any moment his life could go completely out of kilter.

  How had he let that happen?

  She could sense the change in him.

  C.J. turned her head, her cheek brushing along his bare chest, sending delicious little shock waves through her body. There was a pensive look in his eyes. “What are you thinking about?”

  Warrick couldn’t tell her. Couldn’t give voice to his thoughts. Maybe he should have, maybe saying his fears out loud would dissolve them like ghosts in the night, but that wasn’t his way. He’d learned early on to work things out for himself. Now was no different.

  Besides, she was the problem, so how could he tell her what was on his mind? Simple, he couldn’t. Since she was waiting for him to say something, he lied. There was nothing else he could do.

  “Just that the christening’s this Saturday—” He lowered his glance to her face. “It is this Saturday, isn’t it?”

  After all the postponements, she didn’t blame him for being sarcastic. “Yes, it’s this Saturday. Father Gannon’s back, his calendar’s clear, and there don’t appear to be any emergencies in the making, so I feel pretty safe in saying that there’s nothing to get in the way.”

  He played with a strand of her hair, sifting it through his fingers, wondering how he could go back to life as it had been. Feeling that he couldn’t. “Have you come up with a middle name yet?”

  She sighed mightily, staring off at the ceiling. Feeling his eyes on her. “No.”

 
; “That’s okay, she doesn’t need a middle name.”

  In her present vulnerable state, defensiveness seemed second nature to her. “Yes, she does.”

  “Then come up with one.” It sounded almost like an order. He knew his patience was short, not because of her inability to come up with some name no one would ever use, but because of the turmoil going on inside him.

  Why was he snapping at her? “Don’t you think I would if I could? I told you, this is important to me. To her.” C.J. sighed. She’d fallen asleep twice this week with the baby book opened to one page or another. “I have to find just the right name.”

  He’d never seen anyone have so much trouble with a name. “You’re not thinking of postponing the christening, are you?”

  “No.” C.J. ran her hand over her forehead. She could feel a headache in the making. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Just pick a name, any name.” It shouldn’t be so hard. He locked his fingers together, holding her to him. “If you find one you like better, you can always have it legally changed.”

  She sat up and looked at him. “I can’t do that. That’ll mess with her mind.”

  He blew out a breath, thinking for a moment. “Tell you what, I’ll put the five top contenders in a hat and just pick one.”

  Because she was more than a little afraid that she had emotionally abdicated control over her life to him, she was immediately on her guard, taking offense. “Why do you get to do it?”

  She was nitpicking. “Fine, you do it.” Made no difference to him, he thought. “Have your mother do it. Have the bag boy at the grocery store do it. It doesn’t matter who does it, C.J. It doesn’t even matter if she has a middle name, except to you. Stop obsessing and just pick one. It shouldn’t be this hard.”

  There was no point in bristling. “You’re right, it shouldn’t be,” C.J. relented. “I guess it’s this case, it has me completely preoccupied.”

  As if to prove her wrong, Warrick ran his hand along the swell of her body. She could feel a small wave of heat following the path he’d created.

  “Okay, maybe not completely,” she allowed. “But it’s on my mind almost every waking minute.” With a frustrated sigh, she curled into him, resting her head on his chest. The wheels in her brain began to turn. “This investigation’s not going anywhere. It could be weeks before Maxwell zeroes in on anyone. Just because we think he killed two women in a short time frame doesn’t mean he’ll do it again.”

  He’d worked with her long enough to know she was going somewhere with this. Warrick stopped stroking her hair. “So what are you saying?”

  She hesitated for a second, looking for the right words. “Why don’t we set a trap for him? We know where he works. I can show up there, really get into his line of vision. Find a way to talk to him, get him to fixate on me.” She raised her head to look at him, becoming enthusiastic. “After all, I more than fit the general description of women he seeks out.”

  Was she out of her mind? “No.”

  He’d all but fired the word at her point-blank. She stared at him, dumbfounded. “What do you mean, ‘No’?”

  Why did she have to challenge everything? “It’s a two-letter word, what’s so hard about it? No. As in no, it’s a dumb idea. And I want you to drop it.”

  She didn’t like being dismissed out of hand like this. “You have any better ones?”

  “Yes,” he answered evenly, “we continue the surveillance.”

  C.J. frowned. This wasn’t like him. He knew as well as she did why this wouldn’t work. “We can’t continue it indefinitely, and it could be weeks or months before Maxwell does anything, we don’t know. He doesn’t have a pattern—we’ve already established that. Besides, we’re on a day-to-day basis as it is. Alberdeen can pull the plug on surveillance anytime.”

  “Then Alberdeen’ll come up with another idea,” he snapped at her. “You’re not going to dangle yourself in front of a serial killer like so much bait on a damn hook, C.J., and that’s that.”

  Her eyes widened. He’d never treated her like this before. “Since when did you get the right to make decisions for me?”

  “Since now,” he said tersely. Since she’d messed with his mind and turned his world inside out. Since he’d started thinking of her as something other than his partner.

  He was acting territorial, and if he thought she was going to put up with it, he was sorely mistaken. “Just because we’re sleeping together doesn’t give you the right to interfere in my life.”

  “Interfere?” She made him sound like some kind of doorstop. “Is that what it is?”

  She’d wounded him and she knew it. That hadn’t been her intent. She just wanted him to see reason. It had to be this way. “It is when you start telling me what I can or can’t do, yes.”

  “Well then, maybe we shouldn’t be sleeping together.” He threw off the covers and got up. Warrick kept his back to her as he started to put on the clothes they’d brought upstairs earlier. “Maybe this whole thing was a mistake.” He could feel his anger flaring out of control. Just as his emotions had. It had something to do with reflexes and self preservation. “You know, that’s what it was. A mistake. And I made it—” he pulled on his pants “—thinking that this would work.”

  “A mistake?” she echoed, staring at his back. The word couldn’t have cut into her more than if it had been placed on the edge of an arrow and fired directly into her heart.

  In a huff she pulled on her sweater and her jeans, foregoing any underclothing. She wasn’t about to be naked when he was dressed to the teeth. It made her feel much too vulnerable and she’d exposed herself far too much already.

  Warrick left his shirt unbuttoned as he tucked it into the waistband of his pants. He was furious with her for the foolish risks she wanted to take, furious with himself for caring so much that he felt his emotions going out of control.

  This was what he got for letting his guard down. He’d given her this power over him. What had he been thinking?

  Damn it, hadn’t he known this wasn’t going to work? He knew he was no good at male-female relationships. How had he let this go so far, allowed it to affect him so deeply?

  “Yeah, a mistake,” he snapped back. “Neither one of us has a great track record when it comes to relationships. That should have given us a clue that this was all wrong.” He blamed himself most of all. “I, at least, should have seen it coming.”

  What was he saying? That she was too stupid to learn from her mistakes? The headache grew, tangling her thoughts with her emotions, making everything murky, everything painful. “And you don’t think I should have?”

  Jamming his feet into his shoes, he got up and headed for the hall. “You’ve got your head up in the clouds so many times, I’m surprised you don’t periodically fall off the sidewalk.”

  She followed him out, stifling the urge to pummel his back with her fists. Not knowing how they got to this point. “If I did, it would be because I was tripping over you. You always see the dark side of everything, always refuse to even entertain the idea of letting a little sunlight in.”

  He swung around to look at her. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.” And she didn’t. Everything felt confused. But he’d hurt her and she wanted to lash out. “Just get out.”

  He turned away from her and crossed to the stairs. “That’s what I’m doing. As fast as I can.”

  “Not fast enough to satisfy me.”

  But even as he headed down the stairs, she went after him, stunned, appalled. Watching everything unfold before her like some kind of disaster she was unable to stop. Something was making her egg him on, grasping at the excuse, at straws.

  Anything to make him leave.

  Because to have him stay was too frightening.

  She’d seen the vulnerable side of herself and she didn’t like it, didn’t want it. He made her weak because he made her want.

  He had to go.

  “And yo
u can forget about this Saturday,” she shouted at him. Warrick glared at her over his shoulder as he yanked open the door. “I’ll get one of my brothers to be the baby’s godfather. I don’t want to have someone like you in her life.”

  “Fine with me.” He slammed the door.

  She jerked it open. “You don’t get to slam the door in my house,” she shouted at Warrick’s retreating back. “I do!”

  And she did. She slammed it as hard as she could. Then sank down against the door and started to cry huge, body-shaking, soul-racking sobs.

  She wasn’t sure just how long she sat there on the floor, her arms wrapped around her knees, her face buried against them.

  Long enough to cry herself out.

  She felt exhausted. Numb. Rising to her feet, C.J. tried to think, to pull her thoughts together out of the quagmire they’d descended into.

  She dragged her hand through her hair. She felt shell-shocked. What the hell had just happened here?

  Putting one foot in front of the other, she made it to the small powder room just off the foyer.

  This is what she got for letting herself fall in love again. No, not again, this had been something different from what she’d felt for Tom. When she’d loved him, she hadn’t lost a part of herself. She had this time. Warrick had taken out a piece of her soul. And then he’d twisted her inside out until she didn’t know which way was up.

  Who the hell did he think he was, telling her what to do?

  He was the man she was in love with, that’s who. And that had been her big mistake.

  Damn it, what was wrong with her? How could she have let something like this happen?

  But that was just it, she hadn’t “let” it happen, it just had.

  The feelings for Warrick had been there all along. All they had needed was the right catalyst to be set free. He’d kissed her, and suddenly all those feelings made a run for the border, a break for freedom.

  And look where that had gotten her. Miserable in a semidark house, carrying on futile arguments in the recesses of her mind.