by Gayle Wilson
“Shh…” he whispered against her ear. “You don’t want Supercop to come storming up here, do you?”
Without thinking, she put her hand up to touch his cheek. Despite the lateness of the hour, it was perfectly smooth.
Even though it had seemed Sean hadn’t looked her way all day, at some point he’d obviously noticed the beard burn on her throat, the result of last night’s lovemaking. He’d taken steps to see that didn’t happen tonight.
Anticipation created a release of moisture, her body already preparing for his entrance. Although he couldn’t possibly be aware of it, she was embarrassed by her eagerness.
She turned, still enclosed in his embrace, to look up at him. They were close enough that, despite the darkness, she could see his eyes, their blue luminous against the shadowed planes and angles of his face.
“I thought you were still mad at me.” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she felt childish. Ridiculous. All the things he could so easily reduce her to.
“I am.” His mouth lowered to hers. His tongue teased along her parted lips, as his hand again found her breast.
Tonight he cut through the preliminaries, slipping his palm underneath the bottom band of her sweatshirt. His hand traced over her stomach on its journey to its ultimate destination. The abrasiveness of his palm and callused fingers against her bare skin sent chills along her spine.
He caught her nipple between his thumb and index finger, squeezing with enough force to cause it to harden. And with enough force, she acknowledged, to be painful as well.
“Can’t you tell how angry?”
She was totally out of her depth. No one she’d ever had a relationship with would have admitted to being angry at the same time he was fondling her. Roughly fondling her, she amended.
Sean did it as if daring her to react. To refuse his touch. To do something.
She closed her eyes, instead, standing on tiptoe so that her mouth could make contact with his. This time he relented, allowing the kiss.
Influenced by the memory of how he could make her feel, every nerve ending responded. Heat shimmered through her body, rekindling the fires of desire that had, by necessity, been banked throughout the day.
His lips seemed to drug her, pushing all other thoughts from her mind, until there was room there only for him. And for this.
Eventually he broke the kiss by leaning back to look down at her. “This isn’t any smarter than it was last night.”
She didn’t bother to answer. No matter what he felt about the passion that had flared between them, it wouldn’t change what was about to happen. They had both known that from the instant he’d put his arm around her waist to pull her against his chest.
“The other wing.” She stretched upward again to put her lips against his. As far as she was concerned, there had already been too much talk.
Without answering, he turned his head, looking down the stairs. She had actually forgotten that they weren’t alone.
“What about Daniels?”
“He isn’t coming up here.” Sean’s assertion was made with what sounded like absolute certainty.
“How can you be sure?”
The thought of their making love with the young policeman in the kitchen below wasn’t appealing. The idea that he might at some point come up to check on them, one she hadn’t entertained until Sean denied the possibility, didn’t bear thinking about.
“Because when he warned me about wandering around down there during the night, I returned the favor.”
It took her a second. When she understood what he’d done, she laughed out loud.
Sean put his palm over her mouth again, his hold light. Almost, as hard as that was to believe, playful. “Shh…”
She obeyed, but she couldn’t help smiling at the thought of Sean warning Daniels about the dangers of straying into his territory. Not that the cocky young cop didn’t deserve that.
Still, since the officer had the authority of his badge behind him, as well as Bingham’s support, she was surprised Sean had crossed him. Maybe the result of all those years of being in charge of green troops coming to the fore.
As they should. Especially if local law enforcement was going to send a kid to do a man’s job.
Especially when a man was already on it.
The word evoked memories of last night, as well as anticipation of what was to come. And she didn’t want that to be delayed any longer by a discussion of Officer Daniels.
“Come on,” she urged, taking his hand to draw him through the darkness toward the guest rooms.
She’d made the bed this morning in the one they’d used last night, but she hadn’t changed the sheets. There would be time for that before her mother came home.
A wave of uneasiness swept over her as she thought about her parents’ disapproval of what she was doing. Of course, other than the fact that she was in their home, she owed them no explanation or apologies for how she lived her life. She was, after all, thirty-four years old. An adult.
And compared to most women her age, her sex life had been pretty tame. Discreet. Smart. Safe.
Until last night. And tonight, she added.
And no matter what, she would have no regrets about either.
Jenna had probably been aware of the sound on some level long before she awoke. Still, when she opened her eyes to the near-total darkness of the bedroom, it took a moment to identify it.
Rain. Beating against the roof and windows with enough force to be audible, despite the house’s solid construction.
For a moment the image of Carol Cummings leaning into the Inquisitor’s car in just such a downpour was in her head. She destroyed it, refusing to allow those thoughts any place here.
She turned, burrowing closer to the strong, warm body of the man who slept at her side. Her momentary uneasiness dissipated, destroyed by the steadiness of his breathing.
She lay, listening to the unchanging rhythm of it. A slow nasal intake followed by a sighing release. Not quite a snore, but still, completely and comfortingly masculine.
She closed her eyes, trying to return to the dreamless sleep she’d enjoyed before the storm awakened her. Instead, unbidden, her eyelids lifted again as she listened to another sound. One that intruded on the drumming rain and the pattern of Sean’s steady breathing.
She held her breath, trying to decide what she was hearing. Low and regular, it lay like a pulse beneath the other noises.
A dripping faucet? Somehow, despite its regularity, the tone wasn’t right. It sounded more like—
An alarm, she realized. As if someone had set a clock in one of the other bedrooms and then forgotten to turn it off.
She eased up on her elbow, taking care not to disturb Sean. Even then she was unable to determine the distance or direction from which the beep came. It might be something like a wristwatch alarm, she realized, leaning down to put her ear near the one Sean wore on his left wrist.
Assured it wasn’t that, she straightened. At her urging, Sean had locked the door of the guest suite where they slept. It was clear now that the beeping was coming from somewhere beyond this room.
Whatever it was, it could beep all night as far as she was concerned. She lay back down, closing her eyes as she willed her body to relax into the solid warmth of Sean’s.
Despite her intent, she was still aware of the sound, throbbing like a toothache. The rain had slackened, making the other seem louder now than it had before.
She opened her eyes again, focusing on the wall opposite the bed. She could see nothing other than some slight variation in its darkness, probably caused by the shadows of the trees outside the curtained windows.
Still the sound came and went with the regularity of her heartbeat. Silently she released the sighing breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
Ridiculous, she told herself. It was. Still, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to sleep with whatever that was going off and on all night.
She pushed up on her elbow
again, looking down at Sean. He was turned on his side, his lips parted. One hand, wrist bent, was curled against his chin.
He looked at peace and, for the first time since she’d known him, vulnerable. She remembered the exhaustion she’d noticed in his eyes this morning. After the last few nights spent guarding her, he needed the kind of undisturbed sleep he was finally getting.
She hated to wake him up to check on what might turn out to be nothing. An alarm clock. Some kind of weather signal her dad had installed on his computer. Anything. Or nothing.
No room for error. And no second chances.
Sean had slipped the gun under his pillow. The smart thing to do would be to wake him and let him go outside the room to find whatever was beeping.
For all she knew, it might be his cell phone, set to alarm at a certain time. She couldn’t remember seeing him take that out of the pocket of his jeans when he’d undressed. Of course by that time, she hadn’t been paying much attention to things like that.
Maybe he’d used his phone while he’d waited for her in her mother’s sitting room. The thought of her mom’s domain, every item there dear and familiar, was strangely reassuring.
Of course, the same could be said of everything in this house. A house with a very expensive security system. And with a cop on guard duty below. Maybe she could just call down the stairs and asked Officer Daniels to check out the noise—
“What’s wrong?”
Startled by the low question, she glanced down to find Sean looking up at her. Trying to make a decision, she hadn’t even realized he was awake.
“Something’s beeping.”
His gaze left her face, focusing on the ceiling. She held her breath as he listened. The rain had picked up, so that she wasn’t sure he would be able to hear the sound.
She needn’t have worried. He flung the covers back, leaping out of bed. In one motion, he bent, pulling on the jeans he’d dropped on the floor. Although she never saw him reach for it, the gun was suddenly in his hand.
“Get dressed,” he barked.
He crossed to the door in a couple of long strides, leaning his ear against it. Then he bent, seeming to peer under it.
Fascinated, she watched him, believing that any minute he’d let her in on what he was thinking. He straightened instead, looking back at the bed where, on her knees, she’d been waiting.
“What the hell are you doing? Get your clothes on.”
The command pushed her into action. She scrambled in the darkness to find the jeans and T-shirt she’d donned yesterday. All she could locate were the jeans and sweatshirt. She pulled them on and then hurried across the room, coming to a stop beside him.
The beep was louder here. “What is that?” she whispered.
“I’m not sure, but…it could be some kind of smoke detector. Automatic relay?”
He might as well have been speaking Greek. “What?”
“The security system. Does it automatically relay a breach or a fire to the authorities?”
She had no idea. When she had lived here, alarms had gone to the security company. Of course that had been more than ten years ago. “I don’t know. We have to get out of here.”
“I can’t smell smoke—” Sean said, his voice sounding far too calm for her growing panic.
“It’s downstairs.” She had no idea why she was so sure of that. Maybe because of their obvious distance from whatever they were hearing.
“Stay behind me,” Sean said. “No matter what happens, stay with me. This may be nothing.”
Sean stepped to the other side of the door. Then he reached out and opened it with his left hand. He hesitated, nose raised slightly, obviously testing the air.
She did the same, taking a deep breath. She couldn’t smell smoke. With the door open, however, the alarm was louder. More insistent.
“Come on.” As Sean slipped out through the narrow opening, she followed.
He headed for the stairs, stopping to look back at her when he reached their head. When she arrived at that vantage point, she could see nothing frightening below. No flames. Not even the smell of smoke in the air. Still the alarm pulsed, seeming more frantic with each passing second.
“Daniels?” Sean called.
They waited, listening for a response. And hearing none.
“Is there another set of stairs?”
She shook her head, forgetting that he might not be able to see the gesture. “Only this one. There used to be a rope ladder—”
She stopped because she’d remembered what had happened to that. She’d taken it to college with her. It was probably packed away in one of the boxes in the garage.
“This is it.”
“Okay. We’re going down. Stay behind me. Hold on to my waistband so I’ll know you’re there.”
She nodded, but he’d already turned to start down the stairs. He held on to the banister with one hand, the gun in the other.
At the first landing, he stopped and called again. “Daniels? You okay?”
The only response was the beeping.
She took another breath, again testing the air. This time, underlying the familiar scents of her parents’ home, was the terrifying whiff of something burning.
Twenty-Five
Sean didn’t like anything about this. Not the smoke, which had quickly grown thicker as they descended the stairs. Not the fact that the kid hadn’t answered his call. And especially not the absolute certainty in his gut that what was happening right now had something to do with the Inquisitor.
Despite the reality that the cops were probably closer to the killer than they’d ever been before, Sean had never expected the bastard would just give up. But he also hadn’t expected he would so radically change a methodology that had been successful for more than seven years.
This was no longer about stalking his next victim. It had become personal. Between the two of them. With Jenna as the pawn.
He had known he would have to be on his guard every second. He just hadn’t believed that the maniac would try to burn the house down around them.
“I think it’s coming from the kitchen.” Jenna coughed, holding her hand over her mouth as, pulled by the natural ventilation created by the two stories, smoke now swirled up the staircase. “He was going to set up there.”
“What?”
“Daniels. In the kitchen. He said he needed coffee to make it through the night.”
That might explain why the cop hadn’t answered. If he had been in the room where the fire broke out, it would have taken only a matter of seconds for him to be overcome by smoke. People always believed they had longer than they did before the oxygen ran out.
“Front door,” Sean ordered, taking Jenna’s arm to pull her down the remaining steps.
“What about—” The rest was lost as her lungs tried to expel the toxins she’d breathed in.
It didn’t matter that she hadn’t finished. He knew what she wanted him to do. Under any other circumstances, he would have agreed. Under these…
“He’s on his own.”
He managed to get the words out, but opening his mouth to do it let in enough of the choking fumes to set off his own coughing jag. Ignoring his need to breathe, he continued to pull her down the stairs.
They were almost to the bottom. On this level there seemed to be no air left inside the thick pall that obscured the front door. Its pale rectangle had been clearly visible from the top of the stairs. Whatever was on fire was creating an enormous amount of smoke, and it was filling the house very quickly.
Jenna’s sudden stop pulled her elbow from his grip. “It’s only been a couple of minutes. If you get him into fresh air—”
That was followed by more coughing. In the midst of it, he caught the words “fire department.” Surely, given the house’s vaunted security system, she was right about that.
His willingness to try to rescue Daniels wasn’t the problem. Maybe it was better Jenna didn’t realize what was.
Deciding not to waste
breath arguing, Sean concentrated on finding the door. When he had, he located the knob and turned it with his left hand. Nothing happened.
Night latch.
Fingers searching like a blind man’s, he finally found the latch and threw it. This time the knob turned. He jerked the door open, but it caught hard after moving inward an inch or two. Still, the rush of night air that came in through the narrow opening was like an elixir.
He drew in deep draughts of it even as he reached up to dislodge the chain. Jenna’s fingers were there before his.
She pushed the door closed again, shutting off the precious supply of air long enough to slip the end of the chain from the slot. Then, finding the knob with the ease of long familiarity, she got the door open.
He shoved her through, following her across the wide porch and down the brick steps. Coughing, eyes and throat burning, they ran a few feet out onto the lawn before they stopped almost simultaneously.
Jenna bent over, drawing in ratcheting lungfuls of the moisture-laden air between paroxysms of whooping. Although he ached to join her, that was a luxury Sean couldn’t afford.
He held the Glock out in both hands, blinking to clear eyes blurred with tears. He scanned the manicured grass and the trees beyond. Nothing stirred in the darkness. There was no sound but rain, which fell with steady tranquility around them.
“Sean.”
He turned and found that Jenna had straightened and was looking back at the house. In their haste to get out, they’d left the front door open. The outside air pouring through it would fuel the conflagration.
He looked to the left of the entrance, expecting to see flames consuming the rooms beyond the glass of the windows. There were none. Nor was there the eerie glow normally associated with them.
Maybe, despite the thickness of the smoke, the fire itself was still confined to the kitchen. Or maybe Jenna had been mistaken about its location.
His gaze swept the entire length of the house. Wherever the blaze was, it wasn’t visible from the exterior. And if it wasn’t in the kitchen, then…
Then it was possible Daniels was alive. Maybe he’d been overcome by smoke before he could make it to the front door.