Hunted

by Karen Robards

  They were turning him on to his back teeth.

  She was turning him on to his back teeth.

  He couldn’t get the memory of that kiss out of his mind.

  Goddamn it.

  There didn’t seem to be a thing he could do about it, though. Except grit his teeth and try to get over it.

  “Where the hell were you, that you ended up coming out to a crime scene dressed like that?” he asked, because he couldn’t help himself, because even before she had gotten soaked to the skin her bare arms and throat and short skirt still had been pretty damned sexy. Given the rain and the remote location, he didn’t expect her to try to run, which was why he pulled the key to the handcuffs out of his pocket and reached for the chain that linked them. He sounded irritable, he realized. Hell, he was irritable. No, actually, he was tired and desperate and fiercely, stupidly, unbelievably horny, and one of those things was not like the others and it just happened to be the one that was driving him around the bend. What made it even worse was that he wasn’t just horny in general, but horny in particular, for Caroline. Oh yeah, he was jonesing big time for Caroline, and that way lay trouble if he wasn’t careful.

  “I had a date.” Face brightening, she watched him unlock the handcuffs, then as he pulled the bracelets off her wrist and his own she looked up to meet his eyes. “It was nice. I was having fun. You totally ruined my evening.”

  “What can I say? Shit happens.” He put the cuffs onto the table, returned the key to his pocket, and watched sourly as she pulled the elastic off her ponytail and fluffed out her hair. A mass of tangled waves, it hung past her shoulders, wet and wild and—sexy. Shit. “Boyfriend?”

  She shook her head and smiled faintly at him. He automatically tracked the curve of her mouth. Her lower lip was fuller than her upper one; both were the approximate color of raspberries. They tasted like—

  Do not go there.

  “Just a date,” she said. Their eyes met, and what he thought he saw in hers—a reflection of his own reluctant arousal—made him grit his teeth. Sexual sparks crackled in the air around him, and it was all he could do to ignore how hot he was getting and focus on what she was saying. She was looking at him and smiling and saying something that he completely missed, and then she paused and said, “Reed,” in this husky little voice, and that he heard.

  His heart started picking up the pace, but before he could do more than register how dark her eyes had suddenly gone she put her hand on his arm. Her hand was cool from the rain, he knew that because, until a few minutes ago, he had been holding it, but still it felt like it was searing its imprint on the bare flesh of his forearm. He frowned down at her slim fingers, pale against his darker skin, abstractedly curious about how they could be generating such heat.

  “You really can trust me, you know,” she said, and as he looked at her again she rose up on tiptoe and leaned into him so that her breasts brushed his chest and pressed her lips to his.

  Desire hit him like a freight train.

  For a moment he just stood there, not reacting, practically turned to stone by the unexpectedness of her kissing him, letting her soft, warm mouth move on his without responding in any way. But then his lips parted as he breathed in, and the soft scent of her knocked him sideways, and she licked into his mouth, her tongue hot and wet and tantalizing.

  The blaze of passion he felt then shot through his body like a blowtorch. It was primitive. It was intense. Hard as he tried—okay, that wouldn’t be all that hard—it was impossible to resist.

  Making an inarticulate sound under his breath, he slid a hand around the back of her neck and an arm around her waist and pulled her tight against him. Just before his eyes closed he saw that her lashes lay in feathery black crescents across her cheeks and a rosy flush had risen to stain her cheekbones. His mouth slanted across hers, careful at first, taking it slow, getting reacquainted with the taste of her—more rich-bodied wine than raspberries—and then turning fierce with hunger as she responded in a way that said she was dying to get naked with him. He parted her lips and claimed her mouth and kissed her like he was starving for the taste of her, which, as it turned out, he was. Her arms slid around his neck and she kissed him back just as greedily, and as their bodies clung together, generating so much heat that given the dampness of their clothes, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see steam starting to rise around them. He felt the sweet roundness of her breasts and the hard little pinpoints of her nipples against his chest and the firmness of her abdomen moving against his crotch, and realized that he was in grave danger of totally losing his head. But he couldn’t pull back, the choice was already out of his hands, she was driving him wild, making him so hot that it felt like fire was consuming him from the inside out. Every delectable inch of her was plastered right up against him, and his pulse jumped into overdrive and his heart hit about two hundred beats a minute, until his brain conveniently went somewhere else and his dick took the wheel and he was the bone-hard, blazing hot equivalent of putty in her hands.

  Which were at that moment stroking over his shoulders, then sliding down the front of his shirt.

  Those weird cases of humans spontaneously combusting? He was starting to get a handle on how that happened.

  The table nudged his thigh. It was the right height, sturdy: that was the only kind of coherent thought that was getting through to his lust-fueled mind. Shifting around so she had her back to it, he tightened his arm around her waist and lifted her, positioning her so she perched on the edge, then spread her knees by stepping between them. Her thighs hugged his hips.

  He was expressing his precise intentions toward her pretty graphically with his mouth and his body when something—a certain lack of focus in the way she was kissing him back, a sudden change in her breathing, or maybe the feel of something being dragged across his chest, broke through the haze of desire that was driving him and clued him in that something wasn’t quite right.

  He broke off the kiss for just long enough, as he thought, to lift his head and look down at her. Those long lashes lifted. She met his eyes and said, “Reed, I need you to take a step back.”

  Her voice was way cooler than it had any right to be.

  Her eyes weren’t the molten pools of desire he had been expecting to encounter at all. They were watchful. Calculating, even.

  And that heavy thing he’d felt being dragged across his chest? Why, that would be his gun.

  She was holding it. Two-handing it. Pointing it at him. Having pinched it from his damned holster.

  Flushed with sexual heat, her mouth swollen with his kisses, her skirt hiked and her legs spread with him standing between her slim and sexy thighs, she nevertheless managed to look every inch a cop.

  Her eyebrows lifted and mouth quirked up slightly in a Cheshire-cat smirk. “Back off, Reed,” she said. “We’re going to have a little talk.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “WE BOTH KNOW you’re not going to shoot me, Caroline.”

  The rough edge to Reed’s voice was new. It was sexy enough to make her regret what she had interrupted—well, a little bit. The smoldering heat he was giving off notwithstanding, this was not how she wanted things to be between them. Getting her brains screwed out on top of a kitchen table by a man who obviously, until he’d looked down to see his own service weapon pointed at him, had been bent on having hard, fast, mindless sex with her wasn’t the happy ending she had in mind. It also wasn’t why she had kissed him. Getting her hands on his gun was why she had kissed him, and it had worked, so now she needed to put every tantalizing thought of what had promised to be a session of really mind-blowing sex out of her head. To get what she wanted, she was going to have to fight the electricity that still charged the air between them, fight the heat and the urgent quaking inside her that had flared so fast that it had caught her by surprise. Knowing what her purpose had been going in, she’d been hoping to grab his gun without getting overtaken by the desire that had knocked her sideways when they’d kissed before. Tha
t hadn’t happened, but she’d managed to pull out with her objective intact. Now she just needed to stick with the program.

  Which she was determined to do. But he was making it way more difficult than she had thought it would be when she had come up with her plan. To begin with, the man was so mouthwateringly gorgeous that just looking at him made her want to start taking off her clothes. With his handsome face tight with passion and his white shirt wet and plastered to his tall body so that every sculpted muscle of his broad shoulders, wide chest, and strong arms were visible through the sodden cloth, he was the embodiment of every sexy dream she had ever had. She could see the shadow of a nice amount of chest hair through his shirt, and she found herself wanting to undo his buttons and check it out. His tux pants were soaked, too, and clung to his narrow hips and powerful legs like a second skin. His package—oh, God, she caught herself looking at it, and jerked her eyes instantly back to his face. But not before she registered that it was truly impressive, and felt her body tighten and quake deep inside in instinctive, atavistic response. His black hair was damp from the rain, his bronzed skin still showed faint marks from the fight with her father, and a visible amount of stubble shadowed his cheeks and chin. A dark flush rode high on his cheekbones. His mouth was set in a firm, tight line. His jaw was hard. His eyes as they met hers were absolutely black.

  The gleam in them was—carnal. Superheated. Hungry. Well, no surprise there. She’d experienced for herself the intensity of the voltage the two of them had generated. The blazing desire in his kisses had been off the charts. They had made her dizzy, made her want him, left her—as she was still—all soft and shivery and melting inside. Even through the layers of their clothing (all right, the only layer she’d had in the game was her thin panties) she’d felt the absolutely incontrovertible evidence of his arousal pressing hard right up against her, leaving her in no doubt whatsoever about what he had in mind. She could have stopped him with a word, she knew, but for a few steamy minutes there she hadn’t even thought about wanting to. One-night stands weren’t her thing, and giving it up on a kitchen table in a frenzy of lust wasn’t, either, but if they had been, if she hadn’t been on a mission, if circumstances had been just a little different, well, she might have succumbed to Reed, and the hot urgent fire he’d ignited inside her. Despite knowing that unlike him, she at least had had a purpose to her kiss, she had still been responding to him as if he was everything she had ever wanted, still been kissing him back with abandon until she’d almost had to forcefully remind herself that the reason she had initiated the kiss in the first place was to get her hands on his gun. Even after he’d broken off their kiss to frown down at her with his mind clearly so fogged by passion that it had taken him a couple of beats to realize that she was holding his own gun on him, she’d still been so hot for him that calling their steamy little tryst to a definitive halt had been a close-run thing. It had taken every bit of resolve she possessed. She had actually felt regret when she had seen the sudden shock in his eyes and known that there was no going back and she was committed to the path she had chosen. Then he’d taken an involuntary step back and it had been game over—and game on.

  She needed him to take another step back now. Actually, a few more, because he was still standing there between her spread legs and his hands were resting—not holding her but resting, big and warm and distracting—on the outside of her thighs. That meant he was still way too close, and their position still way too intimate, for her peace of mind.

  “Back up.” She gave the order in her cop voice, crisp and authoritative. He complied, slowly, his eyes holding hers, raising his hands to shoulder height with palms up as would any sensible person when facing a gun. As he stepped back, his eyes slid over her face, down her body. Suddenly all too aware of how she must look to him, soaked to the skin, disheveled, and—the word exposed came to mind, followed almost instantly by its more risqué sister, wanton—she frowned. Snapping her knees together, she slid off the table only to discover that her legs were a little wobbly. Leaning back against the table for support, she scowled at him—and kept the gun trained on the center of his chest.

  Oh, God, what had she done? Though he was no longer touching her, his breathing was still clearly irregular. She could see his chest rising and falling as he tried to get it under control. The sensuous, seductive curve that had been his mouth just after he’d stopped kissing her had changed into something grim as reality started to sink in. His eyes bored into hers.

  “Did you kiss me just to get your hands on my damned gun?”

  He was quick. Well, she saw no point in lying about it. She put up her chin. “Yes.”

  He didn’t swear, not out loud, but the look in his eyes did it for him. “They teach you that trick in the police academy?”

  She shook her head. “I came up with it all on my own.”

  “Somebody ought to add it to the training manual.” His tone had bite. “Making it work requires getting a little more hands-on than some officers might like, but it’s damned effective.”

  “Glad you approve.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Like I said, we both know you’re not going to shoot me.”

  She smiled, just to rub it in. “I’ve totally got the drop on you. I could.”

  His hands lowered, and he folded his arms over his chest. “You won’t,” he said firmly, confirming the silent message conveyed by his body language.

  “But I could,” she insisted. “You’ve got to admit it. You’re right, to an extent: I wouldn’t shoot to kill, but I could wound you, maybe hit you in the leg, incapacitate you. Then I could grab the cell phone out of your backpack and call for help.”

  “You might find yourself shit out of luck. Signal’s iffy out here.” His voice was sardonic.

  “I might be willing to take my chances.”

  “You don’t even know where we are.”

  “Southwest of the abandoned Duck Tours place. About two, two and a half miles in.”

  He looked her over for a moment in silence. “The way you were kissing me was damned hot. You weren’t faking it. Just like you weren’t faking it in the car earlier.”

  Was denying it even possible? They both knew how intense things had been. The aftermath still hung in the air between them, as combustible as gas fumes, as tangible as the sound of the rain beating down on the roof. “I guess we’ll never know, will we? Anyway, just because you turn me on doesn’t mean I won’t shoot you. Or arrest you.”

  Arresting him was, actually, something she had thought about when she’d been plotting to take his gun. But given everything she now knew, which was nowhere near the whole story but, still, enough to fill her with doubts about the integrity of the local justice system, having him hauled off to jail was starting to seem like a really bad idea.

  “You couldn’t have waited ten minutes to go for the gun? We both could have gotten off by then.”

  She frowned at him. “Now that’s just crude. Also, overly optimistic. It takes me way longer than ten minutes.”

  The glittering desire was gone from his eyes. Now they simply looked hard. “Cut the crap, Caroline: what do you want?”

  That was the question she had been asking herself for some good little while now. Finally, just before she’d hatched her kiss-and-steal plan, the answer had hit her like a brick to the head: what she wanted was more. More than just this single insane night with him. She wanted a chance to get to know the man she’d been wildly attracted to from the moment she had first laid eyes on him at age seventeen, the man who had been racked with grief at his family’s funeral, the man who was risking his life to save Holly and Ant. The good, solid cop gone ostensibly bad. The hot, sexy guy who once had been a friend. There was something between them; a potent chemistry, the tiny embryonic seeds of an attraction that just might turn out to be something special. Forget a one-and-done, which was clearly what had been running through his mind. She wanted to let those seeds develop. She wanted to explore this thing between them. She wante
d to have sex with him—boy, did she want to have sex with him!—but not as a prelude to parting forever. She wanted them to have a chance.

  Which, since he was going to wind up shot dead, imprisoned for years, or on the run for the rest of his life, wasn’t looking likely.

  Unless, somehow, they could come up with a way to neutralize the big bad that had catapulted him into this situation.

  “Did it ever occur to you that you don’t actually have to tell me anything for me to be in danger?” she said. “All it takes is for someone to think you told me. And if what you know is really that explosive, I’m guessing that whoever it endangers won’t want to take the chance that you kept your mouth shut.” At the arrested expression on his face, Caroline pushed the point home. “I’m not safe no matter what you do. So why don’t you just tell me the whole thing and let us try to figure it out together?”

  The look he gave her was stark with sudden realization as the truth of her logic clobbered him over the head. She could almost see him thinking through the possibility.

  “Here.” She reversed the gun abruptly, and offered it to him grip first. “Take it.”

  His brows snapped together. Still, he wasn’t slow to retrieve his gun. Taking it from her, he checked the safety, which she hadn’t bothered to turn off, although she’d taken care to keep that fact hidden from him until now. Then, weapon still in hand, frowning as though he was in two minds about whether or not he might want to turn it on her, he looked a hard question at her.