The conclusion he’d come to once his dick had backed off and his brain was working again was that not fucking her was in his best interests. Getting involved with Caroline now, sexually or in any other way, would just give him that much more to lose. It would give him way too much skin in the game. If things went south—and he wasn’t seeing very many scenarios in which things weren’t going south—he would just be creating more pain. For himself, and for her, too.
Losing a kid had taught him to be wary of pain. Letting people get too close, letting them become part of the fabric of your existence, was a recipe for the kind of hell that he never again wanted to experience. Right now, the way things stood between him and Caroline, he could still turn his back and walk away without any real damage done to his raw and wary heart.
That was the way he intended to keep it.
With that decision firmly made, he had turned his attention back to helping himself and Holly and Ant. At that moment, having gone to ground in the bayou and with Caroline a constant presence, he’d made the only move he could make.
Punching in the only number he had, which was for his former partner’s old cell phone, he’d called DeBlassis. DeBlassis hadn’t answered, and Reed couldn’t quite remember if the generic leave-your-name-and-number-at-the-sound-of-the-tone response preprogramed into the phone was the same one DeBlassis had had when he’d lived in New Orleans or not. In the spirit of a man throwing a Hail Mary, he’d left a message anyway, updating DeBlassis on what was happening, and instructing him to take that file on the murders he’d sent him straight to the Justice Department.
Which, even if the message got through, even if the cell belonged to DeBlassis and the man listened to his messages and still felt the old partner bond enough to put his neck on the line, wasn’t going to happen immediately: it was Christmas Day, and the government, like most everything else, would be shut down.
I’m counting on you, buddy, he thought, and disconnected.
He was on his own with the responsibility of keeping himself and Holly and Ant alive for at least another twenty-four hours. Right now, for him, the name of the game was delay. While Martin Wallace waited for his 8 p.m. phone call, while the pricks hunting him hopefully ran in circles chasing their tails, he was going to do his best to turn this around.
“Mmm.” Caroline took a deep, sighing breath just then, and stirred a little, moving against him in a way that instantly reclaimed his attention and made him grit his teeth to keep from responding in the way he’d already made up his mind that he wasn’t going to.
Was she waking up?
Time to move.
It took an enormous amount of willpower to get his hand off her ass, but he did it, reluctantly, sliding his palm over the firm warm silk of her cheek before dealing with the temptation to explore further by clenching his hand into a fist.
He had to concentrate on getting himself under control for a full minute afterward before he could summon the determination to reach down and fish the handcuff key out of his shoe, which he’d left beside the bed as a convenient storage/hiding place.
Before he completely lost every bit of his hard-won resolve, he needed to get up. He wanted Caroline so much that he gladly would have crawled over a nest of fire ants if he could have fucked her on the other side. Since that wasn’t in the cards, the only thing to do was get himself out of harm’s way.
His movements must have disturbed her a little, because she stirred again and stretched, long and slow like a sleepy cat. In the process she settled more fully on top of him, trapping his swollen and hungry dick beneath her so he was in real torment, so hot for her that he was surprised not to see flames licking at the covers. Breathing through clenched teeth and starting to sweat, he tried to slide out from under her a little as she stretched some more, luxuriously, extending her legs down the whole long length of his, bare skin to bare skin, stretching her arms upwards until their joined hands were extended all the way through the rungs of the iron headboard and his knuckles brushed the wall. He was pretty sure that the T-shirt she was wearing was now rucked up somewhere around her waist, and he was so turned on by the idea that just getting up and walking away seemed impossible. But he knew he had to move, forced himself to reach up and unlock the handcuffs, and that was what he was doing when she moaned, and squirmed, and pressed the warm wetness of her open mouth to his chest, and rocked against him in a way that froze him in place in the kind of agony/ecstasy arousal that just wasn’t going to be ignored no matter how much he tried to reason it away.
Paralyzed by lust, mind fogged with steam, eyes barely open and teeth clenched as he did battle with a tsunami of torrid desire, he wasn’t prepared for what happened next: she moved, fast.
He felt the coolness of her fingers grasping his wrist, heard a couple of clicks and the rattle of metal on metal, and was still processing the whole thing through a filter of intense lust when she sprang from the bed like a gazelle.
“Hah!” Landing barefoot beside the bed, breasts bouncing, legs flashing, and hair flying, she looked so sexy wearing his T-shirt and nothing else that it took him a second to get the significance of her expression, which was gloating, and her exclamation, which roughly translated as a triumphant gotcha.
Then he got it, all right: she’d handcuffed him to the bed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“GODDAMN IT, CAROLINE.” Scowling at her, Reed jackknifed into a sitting position. His left hand was secured to one of the iron bars that made up the headboard, and the bracelet slid over the iron rattled as he moved. With the quilt puddled around his waist so his muscular chest was on full display, his black hair tousled from sleep and his jaw darkened by day-old scruff, he looked seriously sexy. And cranky. Oh, yes, definitely cranky.
Caroline found that she was loving cranky.
“Payback’s a bitch.” She was so pleased with herself that she couldn’t stand still. Careful to stay out of his reach, she practically did a little dance as she held up the handcuff key tauntingly. “Were you just feeling up my butt while you thought I was asleep, by the way?”
“Give me the key, Caroline.” He ignored her question. Well, she didn’t need an answer: she’d been fully awake from the time she’d felt a big, warm male hand tightening on her butt. If she hadn’t had near instant recollection of the circumstances and identified the culprit as Reed, she would have been coming off that bed with a roundhouse punch for the perp in the space of about half a heartbeat.
But since it was Reed, the real difficulty had lain in her inclination to stay in bed and feign sleep and see where he was going with that. Of course, once he’d quit fondling her and come up with the handcuff key, she’d had the epiphany that had resulted in their current positions. As she’d told him, payback was a bitch.
She just hadn’t expected it to be quite that easy.
At the look on his face, her already wide smile grew even wider. “What, don’t you like being handcuffed? Unless you were planning to, I don’t know, get up and be your usual bullying self, I don’t see why you have a problem with it.”
“Funny. Come on, Caroline. We don’t have time for this.”
She glanced around the shanty. Small, dark, cut off from the outside by the rain that was still falling, it smelled faintly of damp and old wood. The sound of the rain made a constant patter. Other than that, there wasn’t much going on. “Looks to me like all we have is time.”
“I have things I need to do.”
“Like what?”
“Things, okay?”
“Not okay. You want me to let you go, you need to start talking to me. To begin with, I want to know about those suspicious murders.”
He made a derisive sound. “Not going to happen.”
“It will sooner or later. If you want me to unlock those cuffs.”
“What are you going to do, torture me? Pull out my fingernails? Break my kneecaps?”
“All I have to do is leave you sitting there chained to the bed. Sooner or later you’ll have
to go to the bathroom.”
He snorted. “Cher, if you really think I won’t piss in a corner if I have to, you don’t know jack shit about men.”
That thought was so appalling that she had to battle the urge to grimace.
“Your call. I’ll ask you again when I get back.” Directing another taunting smile at him, she headed for the bathroom, ignoring his bellowed “Damn it, Caroline” as the door closed behind her. She could hear the bed creaking and him cursing as, in a leisurely fashion, she used the facilities, washed her hands and face, brushed her teeth, and combed her hair, which, thanks to the humidity in the air, was waving around her face like a coffee-colored Little Orphan Annie wig. She felt fairly confident that the headboard would hold: it had felt sturdy enough. In any case, she was philosophical about the prospect that he might manage to free himself: even if he did, the point had been made. But she was hoping he couldn’t, because he deserved to be right where he was for a while. Her skirt was still damp, she discovered as she checked it. So were her undies and her blouse. Deciding against putting any of them on in hopes that she might be able to wait long enough for them to actually dry, she headed back for the main room.
Having wedged the pillows against the headboard while she was gone, Reed was now leaning back against them, quilt still covering him to the waist, his expression surprisingly tranquil. Or at least, she would have thought his expression was tranquil if it hadn’t been for the distinctly nasty gleam in the look he directed at her as she pushed through the door.
“Change your mind yet?” she asked. Stopping at the foot of the bed, she held the key up and waggled it at him as an incentive.
“Hell, no.”
Okay, appearances to the contrary, he was obviously still feeling a little testy. Testy was almost as much fun as cranky. She smiled at him. He didn’t return her grin; instead, his mouth tightened, and the gleam in his eyes got noticeably nastier.
“Fine.” She headed for the table, where he’d put his gun, still in its holster. Since the table was out of reach of the bed, she presumed he’d left it there so that, handcuffed to his bulk while they slept, she couldn’t get her hands on it.
Well, surprise. Putting the key down on the table, she picked up the gun, pulled it out of the holster, looked at it reflectively, then glanced at him.
“You know you’re going to have to unlock these handcuffs eventually.” He sounded like his patience was starting to fray around the edges.
“Probably.” She restored the gun to its holster and put it back down on the table. It occurred to her that he absolutely knew that she wasn’t going to shoot or arrest him, so he had no need to fear her getting her hands on his gun. Therefore, last night’s handcuff act had not been about keeping her away from his gun. What then had he been trying to keep her away from? That, she decided, was important. The look she turned on him was speculative.
“No probably about it. You really want to try to find your way back through the swamp without me?”
He said that like he thought he was holding a trump card. Well, he was, but no need to admit it to him yet. “I could phone for help,” she pointed out. “One little 911 call, and I bet half the cops in the state would be out here within—what?—fifteen, twenty minutes?”
“More like an hour or two. Anyway, we both know you’re not going to do that.”
She flicked him another look. He’d lost the tranquil expression in favor of a frown.
“Probably not,” she conceded. “But I could. Not to rub it in, but this is the second time I’ve gotten the drop on you, and both times it was incredibly easy. You might want to be a little more careful in the future.”
“Believe me, I will be.” His tone bordered on grim. “Come on, Caroline, I get it: you don’t like being handcuffed. Suppose I agree that I won’t handcuff you anymore?”
She smiled mockingly at him. “I don’t know. The thing is, now I’m finding out that I kind of like handcuffs—on you. Who knew I was kinky like that?”
“Don’t make me break my bed to get free,” he threatened.
“See, that’s the thing about iron. It’s hard to break.”
“Think I can’t do it?”
She shrugged. “You haven’t yet.”
He didn’t reply. Which she thought made the answer pretty self-evident.
The bag of groceries was still on the table. She started pulling items out just to see what was in there. A loaf of bread. A jar of peanut butter. Some packaged trail mix. A couple of apples. A hunger pang assailed her at the sight of the food, and she picked up one of the apples and bit into it. It was tart and juicy. Yum. Looking at him, she took another bite.
He was watching her. “How about bringing me one?”
She laughed—she was so not falling for that—and tossed the other apple to him. He made a good one-handed catch and, with his eyes on her, sank his teeth into it.
She looked at the table next to the grocery bag and was surprised to discover not one, but two phones. One was the prepaid cell phone he’d used to call her father. She knew enough about them to know that when its minutes were used up, it was worthless. The other—she picked it up. Day-glo blue, it didn’t look like anything that could possibly belong to Reed. It was connected to a charger, which was plugged into an outlet via an extension cord.
“You know what I’m asking myself right now?” She took another bite of apple as he chomped hungrily away at his. “I’m asking myself just what you handcuffed me to keep me away from. I don’t think it was to keep me away from your gun.” She paused to swallow.
“Yours?” she asked, picking up the blue phone.
His face told her nothing, which was interesting.
“Stolen,” he replied, then when she lifted her eyebrows at him added, “Holly’s got a bad habit of ripping off tourists.” At Caroline’s expression he shrugged. “Hey, I never claimed he was a saint.”
“How did you get mixed up with him, anyway?” The phone was turned off. She turned it on, and the screen lit up: a picture of a fuzzy white kitten was the screen saver. Verdict: it most likely belonged to a teenage girl. Who hadn’t bothered to password protect it.
“I’ve known him since he was a little kid. I knew his and Ant’s mother.”
“Knew?”
“She’s dead.” His tone changed as she started pushing buttons, calling up, respectively, e-mails and messages and texts and photos. “You know, there was a reason the phone was turned off. So nobody could track it.”
“Hmm.” She quickly pushed a button. The screen went black. She put the phone down on the table like it was hot. The last thing she wanted to do was to draw somebody to them who might be tracking the phone. “Why did you even bring it?”
“In case I needed to make a call that couldn’t be traced back to my phone.” He grimaced.
Throwing the quilt aside, he moved so that he was sitting on the side of the bed. The position left his manacled hand stretched behind him, but it was incrementally more dangerous looking than his reclining posture against the pillows. The only thing he was wearing was a pair of dark green boxers, and the sight of so much nearly naked male flesh was distracting. Stripped down, Reed was nothing if not eye candy.
Taking another bite of her apple, Caroline put the half-eaten piece of fruit down on the table and looked at him reflectively.
The thing was, she didn’t think Reed was worried about her calling for help, either. In fact, she was almost entirely certain of it.
So the question remained: what was he trying to keep her away from?
Gun. Phones. Groceries. Possibly his backpack? A glance around located it: it was right beside the bed. Even handcuffed to Reed as she had been, she could have reached it if she’d wanted.
So, no.
Why would Reed have a phone that Holly had stolen?
Unless Holly had given it to him. Reed almost certainly wasn’t a fan of Holly’s thievery. In fact, she could tell from his tone when he’d spoken about it that he wasn’t. Holly
wouldn’t have given Reed proof positive that he had done something Reed disapproved of without a reason.
And Caroline was willing to bet the reason had something to do with why Holly had been arrested. The reason Reed had basically destroyed his life to get Holly out of jail. The reason she and Reed were at that moment looking at each other measuringly across maybe twelve feet of shadowy space.
The suspicious murders.
Watching Reed closely, she picked up the stolen phone again.
His eyes narrowed. His jaw hardened.
Unless someone knew that the stolen phone was in Reed’s possession, no one would be tracking it to find him. That wasn’t what he was worried about.
He was worried about her finding something on that phone.
She pressed the button to turn it on again. He stiffened. His shoulders visibly tensed.
She smiled triumphantly. “There’s something on this phone that you don’t want me to see, isn’t there?”
“Put the damned phone down, Caroline.”
“I take that as a big fat yes.” She clicked from the fuzzy kitten to the menu.
“It’s got a locator on it. Every minute you have it turned on increases our chances of being found.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “We both know you’re not worried about that. What is it, Reed? What’s on this phone?”
She clicked on the e-mails. The phone’s rightful owner, she saw just from scrolling down through the messages, was named Elizabeth.
“Porn. Assignations with drug dealers. A Justin Bieber video. How the hell should I know?”
A jarring scraping sound brought her gaze back to him in a hurry. He was on his feet now, standing behind the bed, and the scraping sound had been him thrusting it away from the wall.
“You know what’s on it.” She was positive now. “It’s something to do with those suspicious murders, isn’t it?”
“Fine,” he said abruptly. “You want me to tell you about the murders? I’ll tell you about the murders.”
Her initial rush of satisfaction didn’t last much longer than it took her to look at him. His face was dark and hard. His cuffed left hand gripped the back of the headboard as if he wanted to crush it. His whole body radiated tension— Plus, his capitulation had come way too easily.
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