So fucking beautiful!
He held on as long as he could, wanting to watch the dance on her face for as long as possible, wanting to savor every thrust, every shiver of pleasure. But then she began the upward rush, that long ride to the top of the hill, and then she crashed, her body clenching around his, her cries changing in sound and intensity. No man will ever admit that it was a rare moment to be this aware of his lover’s orgasm, but it was a fact that sex, despite the intimacy of the mechanics, is a solitary act. But Gracie’s pleasure was unmistakable, her body’s response to her peak like a brick against the head. If he’d missed it, he truly would have been the most selfish lover on earth.
And the knowledge of her pleasure knocked him out of that place in his head that allowed him to remember he was a man and not an out of control adolescent. His thrust grew more intense, harder and quicker, the pain and the pleasure of this act mingling in his lower belly with a warning he was barely able to heed. He pulled out, spilling his seed across her back as he collapsed against her, his head resting on the pillows above hers, his heart pounding, and his breathing threatened to send him into a dark cloud of hyperventilation.
It'd been a long time since this act had taken so much from him. But it’d also been a long time since he’d felt this fucking good.
She wiggled under him after a few minutes, and he rolled onto his side, his hand sliding over her hair, tangling his fingers in its tresses as he forced her head back. He studied her eyes for a moment, not sure what it was he was looking for. A little piece of the Gracie he’d known, maybe. Whatever it was, he didn’t find it.
“You’d better get in the shower,” he commanded. “We need to be on the road within the hour.”
She obeyed without argument, her body moving a little slower than it had the day before. He watched her go, his cock responding to the sight of her hips swaying despite everything. He lay back and threw his arm over his eyes. This was going to be a long few days if he couldn’t learn to control himself.
When he heard the water come on in the shower, he couldn’t help himself. He got up to join her.
He didn’t have to be happy with the lies she told to take all the pleasure he could from her body.
Chapter 7
Somewhere in Texas
Gracie was staring out the window, already tired of the landscape that had become barren and dry earlier in the day and remained that way. It was all so flat, ranch land with no relief. She’d always lived in the Midwest where the landscape was green with rolling hills. This was something else entirely. She couldn’t wait to get out of the desert and see the beach.
“We should find a phone somewhere so you can check in with Calder.”
She rolled her head, focusing on Durango. Those were the first words he’d spoken to her since they left the little diner in Missouri where they had breakfast. They’d stopped twice for gas, and each time, she’d offered to take over the task of driving, but he ignored her, choosing instead to jump behind the wheel himself. It was like he had to be in control in everything they did together. It was an attitude that was beginning to get on her nerves.
“We should stop for the night, anyway.”
“We will. But I don’t think we should call him from the same place we stop. We don’t want to give anyone a way to trace us.”
“You do realize that your father’s house is one of the first places the FBI will look, don’t you?”
“We’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
He was already pulling off the highway, turning toward her as he looked over his shoulder at the traffic behind them. There was tension in his face, lines that hadn’t been there before she told him her story. She hated that it was her truth that put those lines there, but equally relieved that the truth was finally out in the open instead of weighing down on her from the darkness of her closet.
They pulled into a large truck stop, the smells of the greasy food being served in the little attached diner turning her stomach. She’d never really liked road trip food despite her mother’s great fascination with the many different things people could fry.
“Got a phone?” Durango asked the pretty waitress behind the front counter.
The woman smiled brightly, her eyes moving over him like he was the first truly handsome man she’d seen in a long time. “I’ve got anything you want, sweetheart.”
He leaned forward, his own charming smile coming out to play. “I’m sure you have a lot I’d like to sample. But, for the moment, I just need a phone.”
She giggled a little before turning to grab a purse under the counter. “I’m not supposed to let you use the landline, but you can borrow my cell.”
“Thanks,” he said, letting his fingers brush her palm as he took the device. “I’ll bring it right back to you.”
He walked out of the diner, forcing Gracie to race after him. He was already dialing when she joined him on the far side of the building, out of the way of the traffic that was still coming and going regularly even though the sun had been down for more than an hour.
“Axel,” he barked into the phone, “it’s Durango.”
He listened for a moment, then lowered the phone and punched the button that turned on the speaker feature. Axel’s voice filled the space between them, the distance doing nothing to disguise the annoyance and stress in his tone.
“The cops were here for more than an hour this morning. They think that we had something to do with you getting out of the jail in Chicago. They took computers, paper files, things that they had no right to but their warrant made it impossible for us to do anything.”
“Did you get a copy of the warrant?” Gracie asked.
“We did, and we’ve got the legal department looking at it now.”
“Good.”
“Then they already suspect we’ve left town.”
Durango’s statement was more addressed to Gracie than it was Axel. But Axel answered anyway.
“They know you have. They’ve got people looking for you all over town. They’ve already called your dad, too. He called me, wanting to know what’s happening.”
Durango’s expression tightened slightly. “Have you gotten the forensics from Felicity’s case?”
Axel paused for a second. “We got it. It looks pretty much like the preliminary stuff on Kyle and Hyde. She was strangled with a piece of cotton, probably a t-shirt. Her body was naked, posed on the bed when she was discovered. Like Hyde, she’d had sex not too long before she died—”
“She did?”
“Yeah. They took samples for DNA. They should have something preliminary on that in a few days.”
Durango’s eyes came up to Gracie’s. “It won’t be mine.”
“Are you sure?”
He cocked an eyebrow as if to say he should know where he’d left his DNA. She blushed.
“There was no sign of violence. The cops think she might have had a relationship with her killer.”
“We’ll need a list of people she was close to, then,” Durango said. “I already know a few of the names that will be on that list, but see if you can get something more definitive.”
“Calder’s already up there, trying to get as much information as he can. But it’s been kind of difficult since the cops all know he works for us.”
“We should get someone else to look into it.” Gracie stepped back, trying to think of someone she might be able to trust, someone who’d be willing to go out on a limb for her. She couldn’t really contact anyone in the FBI because of the obvious conflict. But maybe . . .
“What about Zola?”
Durango’s head came up at the same time Axel said, “Zola? But she works for us, too.”
“Yes, but not a lot of people know that. Besides, she’s developed something of a reputation after appearing on Stranger’s Retreat. Maybe she can use that to get close to someone in the homicide division.”
“It might not be a bad idea,” Durango admitted, looking at her with something besides the ang
er and distrust that had been his prevailing emotion since the farmhouse. “She does have a point, that no one knows she works for Mastiff. Or that she was on that show in an investigative role. It might work in her favor.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Axel said, a little doubt in his voice.
“We’re incommunicado at the moment,” Durango told him, “but we’ll check in again tomorrow.”
“We’ll stay on this as best as we can. But I can’t make any promises, especially with the police watching us the way they are.” He hesitated a second. “They left bugs in the offices, and they have patrol officers parked outside. I’m pretty sure they have someone tailing me and Calder, too.”
Durango glanced at Gracie. She knew he didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
“They can’t stop you from investigating the murders, Axel,” she told him. “Just keep your nose clean and do what you can as legally as possible. Don’t give them a reason to have one of you arrested.”
“I definitely will not do that.”
Durango disconnected the call and studied her face. “Why are they watching Axel and Calder?”
“They think they’ll be in contact with you, which they have been. They probably already traced the call I made to Calder from the farmhouse.” She leaned back against the brick wall and dragged her fingers through her hair. “I should have been more careful, but I thought we had a few more days before they’d see through the paperwork Todd took them.”
“We just have to be more careful from here on out.”
There was something like an apology in his voice. She looked up at him, a soft smile touching her lips despite everything. Apology was a product of empathy. If he was feeling empathetic, was it possible he might forgive her one day?
But then he walked off without another word, not bothering to see if she would follow. By the time she caught up with his long strides, he was once again leaning over the counter, flirting with the waitress. She dropped into a booth and watched, jealousy mingling with a bit of shame, shame for allowing him to get to her so completely. How unprofessional was it to fall for a suspect? For all she knew, he was the killer, and he was just so smart that he’d managed to fool her.
But she really didn’t believe that. What she believed was a little darker, for him, at least.
What if it was Jackson Chamberlain?
It made all kinds of sense. Durango was in the same location as most of the murders over the years because he was with his father, working on the set of his movies. And the Dallas murders? Jackson could have been visiting his son at college. Why not? Father’s had been known to do that sort of thing. And the periods of inactivity? They could correlate with times Jackson had been overseas, making movies or attending film festivals. She knew for a fact that he’d lived for more than a year in France during one of those inactive periods.
What would it do to Durango if she told him she suspected his father? He already believed his father was responsible for his mother’s death. Would this validate those suspicions, or would it kill any sense of hope he might harbor that his father was not the monster the five-year-old inside of him believed he was?
She watched as the waitress ran her hand over the back of his arm and wondered how much more hurt, disappointment, and grief that man could take before he finally broke. Or had he already broken? He might not have killed Kyle, but was it possible he had more knowledge of these murders than he wanted anyone to know? Had he killed Detective Hyde?
She couldn’t ignore the fact that he’d had particularly rough sex with Detective Hyde before she died, rough enough that the coroner was convinced she’d been raped. Despite the force with which he’d taken her just that morning, it wasn’t nearly as bruising and painful as what he’d done to the detective to alert the coroner that way. Was it possible he’d killed Hyde, and his father offered him an alibi because they were complacent in each other’s crimes?
She didn’t want to doubt Durango. Deep in her heart, she believed him to be innocent. But the trained investigator inside of her couldn’t ignore the facts, either.
The fact that Felicity had been engaged in sexual activity before her death put a twist on the whole thing. Was it violent? Could it suggest she was intimate with the man who killed her? This time she knew it wasn’t Durango. Durango had been at the office the night Felicity was killed. She knew because she had a program on his computer that activated the webcam on his computer even when he wasn’t using the thing, which he rarely did. She had footage of him sitting at the desk, dictating notes into a hand-held recorder he must have bought when he was in high school it was so ancient.
But did that mean he was innocent? What if his father killed Felicity and Durango intentionally pulled a long night at the office to establish himself an alibi with the security guards downstairs? Not that this was enough to keep the judge in Chicago from issuing a warrant. Her video might have been, just like it was probably enough to prove he didn’t kill his assistant, either. She had video of him on that night, too. But she didn’t have video on the night Kyle or Hyde was killed, so any good prosecutor could find a way to discredit the illegal video if she were ever to give it to the right people. And if his father was the strangler and he was helping him . . .
It was all such a damn mess! The more she thought about it, the smaller the circles she was stuck inside of became. It just seemed like there was too much, too many moving parts, too many victims, too much evidence. And it all kept pointing in Durango’s direction. If not him, if not his father, then who?
“Let’s go,” Durango said, suddenly appearing at her side. He grabbed her upper arm and pulled her from the booth. “We need to get on the road.”
“Are you sure you want to leave? It looked to me like you were having a pretty good time.”
He looked at the counter where the waitress was watching them with naked curiosity. “When the police come to question her, she’ll remember a flirty guy with a story about traveling for business with a trainee who caused him to lose his cell phone. She won’t have any idea which direction he came from or which he left in. And she will be very unlikely to remember the attractive woman who was traveling with him.”
It was smart. She stepped in front of him and walked quickly, not glancing back to keep the woman from getting a good look at her face. This one thought kept dancing in her head as they walked to the SUV.
“You think I’m attractive.”
Durango jerked open her door, pushing her against the frame with the weight of his body. “I think you’re fucking hot,” he said close to her mouth, making her lips soften in anticipation of a kiss. “But that has absolutely nothing to do with anything.”
He walked away, taking the air out of her sails. She sank back against the side of the SUV for a long second, her heart pounding and her mind reeling.
“Asshole,” she muttered as she climbed into the car.
He laughed for the first time since she walked into his office three nights ago.
Chapter 8
Amarillo, Texas
Roadside Motel
The motel was actually called Roadside. Durango found all kinds of humor in that idea. He sat by the window, sipping from a plastic cup he’d filled with a cheap cinnamon flavored whiskey, staring up at the neon sign that flickered in the darkness of near dawn. He should be asleep, but his mind was too busy to allow for that. So, the whiskey and the amusing sign came into play.
Gracie made a noise in her sleep. He looked over at her, taking more from the soft curves of her face than he should have. He never thought he would again take pleasure from the sight of a woman in his bed. Since Sarah, a woman in his bed was just a conundrum on how to get her out without the drama. But Gracie was different, as much as he hated to admit it. During the day, when he looked at her, all he could think about was the lies she’d told him. But at night . . . How could he be so conflicted about one woman? If the sex wasn’t so fucking good!
He turned back to the win
dow and sipped his drink, the warm buzz familiar and almost comforting. There were so many things he should be thinking about at the moment. He was on the run from law enforcement, something he never imagined he’d do. He’d been a cop. He had a deep respect for the law. But he also knew he couldn’t go to jail, and if this was his only chance to prove himself innocent, he had to take it. He didn’t like the idea of needing to run to his father for help, but if that was what it was going to take, that’s what he had to do.
No, his mind wasn’t worrying about all that. He was thinking about the past, thinking about the life he’d had before the Harrison Strangler entered the stage. He was thinking about the year he spent on the Dallas Police Department’s rolls, remembering the experiences that reinforced his decision to go into law enforcement even as his father was whispering in his ear all the things he could do if he simply went back to school. He would have stayed in Dallas, but his opportunity for advancement was limited by budget issues within the department. So he applied to a dozen departments all around the country, and it was Chicago that had everything he wanted. He advanced through the ranks quicker than he’d imagined he could, settling in as a detective like he’d always been meant for the role. Meeting Sarah and their dreams for the future were just the icing on top of the perfect cake.
But he wasn’t that man anymore.
He wondered what Sarah would think if she could see him now. She’d once told him that he was the perfect gentleman, that it was his charm and his compassion that had drawn her to him. That it was the way he looked at the world, not allowing the bitterness of his past to change the way he dealt with people. She whispered that to him the night after he proposed. What would she think to see him in a motel room with another woman, filled with anger and grief, drinking himself into a stupor that might allow him a few more hours of sleep?
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