“Serves you right,” she murmured, and sighed, content. The firm weight of him was pressing her into the mattress, so breathing was a bit more of an effort than normal, her thighs were beginning to ache from their position around his waist, and she was pretty sure a button on the coverlet was permanently embedded in her back. But none of that seemed important enough to actually move.
“I don’t think we should ever move from this spot,” he muttered, echoing her thoughts and making her smile.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Although eventually, I am going to have to pee.”
He grunted in her ear. “Give me at least a two-minute warning.”
She chuckled and let her legs slide off his hips, wincing a bit as her thighs protested the movement. He may have sensed her discomfort, or perhaps he just felt the tremble of strained muscles, his hands slide down her sides to her legs and began massaging in gentle circles.
“Oh,” she sighed.
“Good?”
“Oh yeah.” She stretched under his hands, her toes curling a bit as the last bit of tension left her body.
“I’m too heavy for you.”
“Maybe a little.” She turned to look at him, his face so close to hers they bumped noses. “But this is nice.”
He nudged her nose with his. “It’s perfect. Except…”
“Except?”
“There’s vanilla bean ice cream in the freezer.”
“Really?”
“With hot fudge and whipped cream.”
“Hot fudge sundaes? Oh, go get it.” She landed a playful smack on his ass. “Make mine with extra fudge.”
“Hey.” He reached back to rub his butt. “I cooked dinner.”
“And it was delicious,” she assured him.
“I thought whoever made dinner didn’t have to get dessert.”
“No, you’re thinking whoever makes dinner doesn’t have to clear the dishes.”
“But I already cleared the dishes.”
“Whoops.” She laughed when he frowned.
“Next time, you cook and clear,” he told her, and pushed off her to sit on the side of the bed.
“I think next time we’re ordering in.”
“Well, then you’ll have to take out the garbage.” He glanced back over his shoulder as he dealt with the condom. “You want to eat in bed, or come downstairs?”
“I’ll come downstairs if I can borrow your shirt.”
“What’s wrong with naked?” he asked.
“I can’t be in the kitchen naked,” she told him, and suppressed a shudder. “It would just be unsanitary.”
“Girls are weird,” he decided, but snagged his shirt off the floor and held it out for her.
He chuckled when her hands disappeared in the sleeves and deftly rolled them up to her wrists. “On second thought, that looks great,” he told her. He tugged on the open lapel. “Just like that.”
She rolled her eyes and brushed his hands away to button it up. “Ice cream,” she reminded him.
“Spoilsport,” he muttered, and snagged a pair of boxers out of the dresser as he followed her out.
They padded down to the kitchen, tiptoeing past the living room where Beau snored away.
“How does he wedge himself under the coffee table like that?” she whispered.
“I have no idea,” he said, and flipped on the kitchen light.
She followed his directions and found bowls and spoons while he dug out the carton of ice cream and toppings.
“Sprinkles?” she said, delighted.
“How can you have hot fudge sundaes without sprinkles?” He pried the lid off the carton and dug the scoop into the frozen treat.
She started to hitch herself up on one of the kitchen stools to watch him work then frowned. “Nuts.”
“Yeah, I got nuts.” He shook the can of salted peanuts at her.
“No.” She laughed. “I meant—nuts, I forgot my cell phone at home.”
“You can use my phone if you need to make a call.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t need to call anyone, I just want to have my phone with me in case anyone calls.”
He scooped ice cream into a bowl. “Like who?”
“Bridget, mainly. She had to change hotels, and I’d like her to be able to get in touch with me if she needs to.”
He frowned. “Why’d she change hotels?”
“Max has been harassing her a bit.” She read the look on his face and held out a placating hand. “He hasn’t done anything threatening, he’s just calling and bugging her. Since he knew what hotel she was staying in, she switched. And she’s keeping her cell phone off because he was blowing that up, so if she happens to call, I don’t want to miss her.”
She slid back off the stool and headed for the kitchen door. “I’m just going to run back home and get it.”
He frowned and paused in mid-scoop. “It’s dark.”
She blinked. “It’s fifty feet across the lawn.”
“Still.” He put the scoop down and wiped his hands on a dishtowel. “I’ll walk you over.”
She laughed, incredulous. “Are you kidding?” She saw that he wasn’t. “Nate, come on. That’s silly. I’ll be gone two minutes, tops. I’ll probably be back before you finish making the sundaes.”
“Okay,” he said with obvious reluctance. “But if you’re not back in two and a half minutes, I’m coming after you.”
“Aw.” She leaned over to press a kiss to his chin. “Don’t forget,” she said as she moved toward the door. “I want nuts on mine.”
“Right, nuts.”
“And extra whipped cream,” she called over her shoulder.
Lily shut the door behind her and started across the drive, breaking into a trot when she hit the grass. It was damp beneath her bare feet, cool and soft, and she barely resisted the urge to curl her toes into it. She knew if she wasn’t back in the prescribed two and a half minutes, he’d be chasing her down.
It was kind of cute, actually, the way he was just a little overprotective of her. Misguided, of course—she could take care of herself—but it was nice to be worried about.
She smiled a little as she let herself into the stairwell and padded up the stairs. This relationship was moving faster than she’d expected, but it was hard to regret it when it made her feel this good.
She was grinning when she opened the door to her apartment, eager to grab her cell phone and get back to her hot man and hot fudge sundae. Then she was screaming.
* * * * *
Nate was out the door and running across the lawn before the sound from that first scream had fully faded away. He hit the outside door at full speed, taking the stairs two at a time. He burst through the open door of the apartment and almost slammed into Lily. She was standing stock still in the doorway, facing the room.
“Lily, what’s wrong?” He stepped in front of her, taking her by the shoulders and giving her a small shake. “Baby?”
She blinked up at him. “Nate.”
“What, what’s wrong?” He looked her over, every inch, but aside from the shell-shocked expression on her face, he couldn’t see anything wrong with her. “The way you screamed I thought you were being attacked.”
“Not me.” She pointed behind him. “The apartment.”
Nate turned around and swore under his breath. The place was ransacked—drawers pulled out and emptied, stuffing spilling out of slashed cushions, books pulled off the shelves and tossed hither and yon. The kitchen cabinets had been emptied, their contents strewn all over the counters and floor.
“Fuck.”
She laughed, the sound hollow and strained. “Yeah.”
She took a step forward, and his hand shot out to grasp her arm. “Where are you going?”
“I want to see if the bedroom’s okay, the bathroom.”
“Let me go first,” he told her. “In case whoever did this is still here.” He saw the hesitation on her face, the need to inspect her property herself. “Please. It’d make me f
eel better.”
She sighed and wrapped her arms around her shoulders in an unconscious hug. “Okay. Hurry though?”
He squeezed her arms reassuringly. “I’ll be back in two seconds,” he assured her, and stepped down the hall.
It only took half that long for him to see the rest of the apartment had suffered the same fate. The shower curtain in the bath had been slashed, and the floor was littered with debris, all the little pots and tubes, what he often thought of as the tools of being female, were spilled or smashed or smeared all over the floor. In the bedroom, the bed had been stripped, pillows ripped open and tossed in the corners, the drawers ripped from the dresser and emptied.
The closet showed signs of more destruction. All the clothes had been stripped off the hangers and pulled from the shelves to be left in a pile in the middle of the floor.
Face grim, he strode back to the living room. Lily was right where he left her, standing by the door with her arms wrapped around herself.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” He reached out to fold her into his arms, rubbing her back in gentle circles when she simply sank into him. “We need to call the cops.”
“I know.” She moved back, her hand pressed to her forehead as she looked around the room. “I have no idea where my phone is.”
He kept his hand on her shoulder, his voice soothing. “Do you remember where you had it last?”
“In my purse,” she said, voice still blank with shock. “I put it on my dresser when I got home from work.”
He barely controlled a wince at when he remembered the state of the closet. “I’ll go look for it.”
“No, I’ll go.” She patted his arm absently and started to move past him.
He almost stopped her then reconsidered and let her go. “Try not to touch anything you don’t have to,” he told her, and she nodded as she walked down the hall.
She’d have to see it at some point, he told himself, though he wished he could put it off a little longer. The blank look on her face was a little unsettling. It was shock, of course—any sane person would be shocked to find their home had been broken into—but he was more than a little worried at the depth of it.
He raked a hand though his hair, feeling helpless. He knew he shouldn’t do anything until the police came to take a report—disturbing the crime scene was always the biggest mistake made by victims on TV cop shows, and he had no reason to believe they weren’t accurate as far as that went. But he knew when she snapped out of the haze she was in she’d be appalled at the state of her living space. Someone as organized and controlled as Lily was bound to go buggy over a kitchen covered in Cheerios.
He looked up when he heard her footsteps coming back down the hall, and despite the seriousness of the situation had to fight to keep the grin off his face. Her eyes were lit up, her cheeks blazing with color, and her hand was fisted around the rescued cell phone so tightly he wondered how the plastic didn’t crack.
“Did you see what they did to my bedroom?”
Guess the shock is wearing off, he thought. Out loud he said, “Yeah.”
“And the bathroom, all my makeup?” She flipped open the phone and started punching numbers with barely restrained savagery. “That wasn’t cheap drugstore crap, that was high-quality, department-store crap.”
He reached out to rescue the phone. “I saw, honey. I’m sorry.”
“Bastards,” she muttered, and clenched her hands into fists. “It’ll cost me a fortune to replace all that.”
Nate reached out to squeeze her shoulder reassuringly. He spoke quickly to the police dispatcher when she answered, reciting the address. “No, no one’s hurt,” he told her when she asked if they needed emergency medical services. “We just need to file a robbery report.”
He hung up the phone and turned back to find her watching him with anxious doe eyes. “They’re sending someone over, but since no one is hurt, it might be a while.”
Those doe eyes narrowed dangerously. “If I’d gotten here any earlier, somebody’d be hurt.”
“Are you nuts?” he asked quietly.
“Did you see my pillows? I bought them new last week!”
“So…what? You’re going to confront an intruder because you’re worried about replacing the damn pillows? I’ll buy you some more pillows, for Christ’s sake, don’t be stupid.”
She sucked in a breath. “Did you just call me stupid?”
“No, I said don’t be stupid. You’re talking about putting yourself in danger for things, Lily. Things can be replaced.”
“My things are important to me,” she said, and crossed her arms over her chest. “The sanctity of my home is important to me—”
“Sanctity?” he asked, and rolled his eyes. “It’s not a church, Lil.”
“Don’t call me Lil,” she ground out. “And yes, sanctity. This is my home, my space, my personal things. And somebody came through here and turned it into garbage. Forgive me if I’m a little pissed off!”
He sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“But confronting an intruder would be a very bad idea, and as important as your things are to you, I’d rather replace them a thousand times than have you in danger for one moment.” He reached out for her hands, sighing with relief when she allowed him to take them. “I can buy more pillows and makeup and hire a truckload of people to come in here and clean all of this up—”
She wrinkled her nose. “Ew, no.”
He blinked. “Why no?”
“Strangers going through my things?”
“An intruder went through all your things, the cleaning people put them back the way they were. It’s a good thing.”
“Not really. First the intruder then the cleaning people. It’s all strangers in my stuff.” She shuddered. “It’s a double violation.”
He simply stared at her. “I’m not going to understand this, am I?”
She shook her head. “Probably not.”
“Girl thing?”
“Mostly just a me thing.”
“Right.” He drew a breath. “I had a point, I think.”
“Replaceable things,” she prompted.
“Right. Things are replaceable. You’re not. Please don’t do something stupid.”
“You know, I really hate the word stupid,” she said, and held up a hand when he opened his mouth to speak. “But I get it. Don’t put myself in unnecessary danger.”
“What danger would be necessary?” he wondered.
“It’s just… I’m so pissed, Nate. Pissed.” She drew a steadying breath, letting it out slowly before speaking again. “So pissed that if I had caught whoever did this in the act—” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I would have done.”
“I’m glad you weren’t here to find out.”
“Probably for the best,” she muttered, and sighed. “I guess I should put something on.”
He looked down at her bare legs under his shirt. “Good idea,” he agreed. “Come on back to the house, we’ll get your jeans.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to leave here, not until the cops come. I’ll get something out of my closet.”
“Honey,” he said gently, “I don’t think you have anything left in your closet that’s fit to wear.”
Her eyes went wide. “What did they do to my closet?”
He sighed. “Walk with me back to the house, and I’ll tell you.”
Chapter Twelve
By the time the police showed up to take a report, Lily had calmed down enough to start thinking again. While the baby-faced officer in his crisp blue uniform went though taking pictures of the destruction and Nate gave his statement to the plain-clothes cop who’d come with him, she sat at her kitchen table and thought.
As much as she’d like to pretend otherwise, the idea that this had been a random robbery wasn’t making much sense. Though plenty had been destroyed, nothing had been stolen. The television was sti
ll in its nook, her iPod and laptop still on the shelf. She hadn’t had a chance to search through the bedroom, but she’d spotted several pieces of jewelry scattered about the room—the pearls her mother had given her when she graduated from college, a pair of small gold hoops she’d treated herself to when she got her first job. Easily fenced, worth a few hundred each, so why weren’t they taken?
Because, she thought, taking hadn’t been the point. Destroying had been the point, and as pissed off as she was, she was just as scared.
“Lily?”
She blinked up at Nate. “Sorry,” she said, forcing a smile for the cop standing next to him as she pushed to her feet. She realized that while she’d been brooding, the uniformed officer had apparently finished his tour of the destruction and was waiting by the front door.
“No problem,” he said easily, a handsome man with silver hair and dark eyes. “I just wanted you to know we’ve got everything we need, so you can go ahead and start cleaning things up if you like.”
“Oh good,” she sighed with relief.
“I’m having a cleaning service come in tomorrow,” Nate interjected, watching her steadily as she looked at him with surprise.
She stifled her instinctive Over my dead body and forced another smile. “Thank you.”
His lips twitched. “You’re welcome.”
“Anyway, I’ll be in touch,” the detective said, and laid a business card on the table. “Feel free to call me if you have any questions.”
“Thank you, we will,” Nate told him.
They shook hands, and Nate walked him to the door. Lily ignored the low murmur of voices and picked up the card on the table.
“Lieutenant Michael Graham,” she read out loud as Nate walked back to the table. “They sent a detective out here for a simple burglary?”
A ruddy flush bloomed on his cheeks, and he muttered something unintelligible.
“What?” she asked, intrigued by the blush.
“I said, they sent a detective sergeant because I’m a celebrity.”
“Ah,” she said, and felt the welcome flood of humor. “Well, you did once sing at the Hollywood Bowl with Barbara Streisand.”
“Oh shut up,” he said irritably, and she laughed.
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