by Lisa Childs
But she’d kept herself aloof not just in her personal life but her professional one, too. The director hadn’t assigned her to cold cases just because she’d asked. She knew that she had a reputation for being unsympathetic and insensitive. And until today, she would have agreed.
But with Trent, she was too sensitive—to her feelings for him and now to his feelings. All the torment she’d glimpsed in the depths of his green eyes and heard in the gravel of his deep voice, she now felt. And she knew only one way to end it … for them both.
“Please,” she begged him, “please, you need to write the rest. To end this again, you’re going to have to find out what happened thirty years ago.”
He expelled a ragged sigh. “You’ve been working these cases for a long time.”
“Just a few years on those cases. But my whole life,” she said, “I’ve been trying to find out who I was and what exactly happened to me.”
“And now that you know …?”
She wished she didn’t. With understanding, she said, “So that’s why you’d rather not know which man you were—killer or hero.”
“The detective was no one’s hero,” he insisted. “So many women died senselessly. And he hadn’t even been able to protect the woman he loved.”
“We’re not those people anymore—those people we once were,” she reminded him and herself.
He laughed. “We are. We have their memories. Their souls …”
But not their hearts. At least, not hers. The killer had taken hers. In her past life. In this life, she was afraid that she was going to give it to him willingly.
The frustration, the torment emanating from him to her, didn’t ease. She reached out again, sliding her fingers across the back of his hand.
This time he didn’t pull away. He turned his hand around and caught her fingers, entwining them with his. And the frustration changed, became sexually charged, as desire caught fire between them.
Too hot, too intense.
She felt hers and his.
And she was overwhelmed. Her knees weakened, and her head grew light. She swayed as blackness threatened to consume her, like the desire burning her up.
He caught her. His heart pounding in his throat, he swept her up in his arms. This woman who was so strong, this woman who’d dropped a man twice her size, had nearly collapsed. What the hell was wrong with her? “Are you all right?”
“I—I can feel you.”
Cradling her with one arm, he slid his other along the delicate line of her jaw. “I can feel you, too.”
She shook her head, weakly. “No, I can feel … what you feel.”
He would have laughed at the irony of her being the one person whose emotions he could not feel. But he understood how frightening that first experience with empathy had been. And of anyone’s emotions, his were complicated and conflicted as hell. But for what he felt for her.
“You want me,” she said.
“Badly.”
“So take me,” she offered. “Just … take me …”
“Alaina?” Hope sent his pulse racing. Could she want him, too? “Are you sure?”
“I want you,” she said. “I want to know …”
Who he was?
“What it was like,” she clarified. “I want to know what it was like between us. I only have those images. I want the reality. I want to feel you—and all the passion—in the present, not the past.”
“It may be too much,” he warned her. Not just for her, though. He worried it might be too much for him. Their connection was already so strong.
“I want to know, even if it’s too much.” She reached up, locking her arms around his neck and pulling his head down to hers.
He kissed her. Just a brush of his mouth across her sweet lips before he pulled away. No matter how much he wanted her, he wouldn’t take her here, not on the desk or the floor or the narrow leather couch on one side of the room. His body throbbing with a need so intense it was painful, he carried her to the bookshelves and he knocked his elbow against the switch that slid them apart to reveal the doorway to the back stairs.
She wriggled, trying to regain her feet. “I can walk.” Her breasts pushed against his chest, her hip rubbing against his abdomen.
He tightened his hold and climbed the narrow steps. Another press of a button and the back wall of the closet opened; he passed through its open door into the master bedroom.
She trembled against him, and his arms tightened even more. But then he forced his muscles to relax and he released her. She slid down his body, her thighs pressing against his, her hips arching against the erection that throbbed, almost painfully, behind the zipper of his jeans.
But he didn’t know if she trembled out of fear or desire. “If you’re afraid, you can leave.”
And somehow he would force himself to let her go.
She didn’t step away from him. She stayed close, so close that he felt the warmth of her breath as she released the laughter, which had actually been what had shaken her body. “I can’t believe that you literally have secret passageways. This place is really a castle.”
“It’s a fortress,” he admitted.
“To keep people out?” she wondered aloud, her gaze soft on his. “Or yourself inside?”
He shuddered now. She knew him so well. And still she wanted him?
“This is your last chance,” Trent warned her, fisting his fingers into his palms so that he wouldn’t grab her and pull her tightly against him. “This is your last opportunity to leave.”
She shook her head. “You don’t scare me.”
“Then that makes one of us.”
She laughed again, then she reached for him, her hands locking around the nape of his neck to pull his head down to her level. “And really kiss me this time. Kiss me like you kissed me last night.”
He kissed her like a drowning man gasped for air, filling his lungs with the warmth of her breath, the sweetness of her desire for him. He felt it not in the way he experienced other people’s emotions. He felt her feelings in the scrape of her teeth across his bottom lip, in the flirty forays of her tongue sliding inside his mouth, tangling with his.
She pulled away and staggered back a step, dazed, as she panted for breath. “The things you can make me feel with just a kiss …”
“It’s what you make me feel,” he said. “But you know what I’m feeling. You’re experiencing it now, the force of my desire for you.”
Obsessive desire? Did he dare do more than kiss her? Was this really her last chance to leave him before he wouldn’t let her leave him ever again?
But then she reached for the buttons on her suit jacket, her fingers trembling as she undid them. She shrugged the jacket off her narrow shoulders and reached next for her holster. Her fingers steady now, Alaina held tight to the handle of her weapon.
He tensed, waiting for her to turn the barrel on him. Had this been her plan all along? Did she remember more than he had remembered? Did she already know he was the killer?
Maybe she hadn’t come up here for answers. Maybe she’d come after him for revenge.
“Are you going to use that on me?” he asked, gesturing toward her gun.
She stared down at it, as if she hadn’t realized she held on to it. Her eyes widened in surprise.
“Do you think you’ll need it?” he asked, reeling from the flash of hurt over her doubts. But he couldn’t blame her for doubting him when he doubted himself. “Do you think I’m going to hurt you?” Or that he already had?
Chapter 9
“I can feel what you feel,” Alaina said, still stunned that she possessed that strange ability. “But I can’t read your mind.”
If only she could, then she would have the answers—all the answers—she sought. She would know if she was doing the right thing or making another mistake that would cost her this life.
“You don’t need the gun,” he assured her.
She didn’t trust him, but she wanted him too much to listen to the voice
of common sense that nagged at her conscience. Or maybe it was Vonner’s voice, gruff with all the suspicions he’d spewed about Trent Baines.
She’d called in sick to work today, the first day of work she’d missed since the vacation her mother had forced her to take a few years ago. Before Alaina had discovered the cold cases that coincided with the memory of her death.
Since then, she hadn’t missed a day. Until now.
Maybe she was sick. She hadn’t slept at all after reading those pages of his manuscript, after discovering who she’d been and what she’d done.
If only she knew for sure which man Trent Baines had been.
Her husband or her killer.
“I won’t hurt you,” he promised, his green eyes bright with a sincerity she felt as acutely as if it was her own, like the flash of hurt that had twinged in her chest when she’d first touched the handle of her gun. That had been his hurt—that she had doubted him.
But the doubts held tight to her. She’d known him such a short amount of time in this life.
Yet she felt as if she’d known him forever in another. That it was just perfectly natural, and absolutely necessary, to make love with him. “Trent …?”
“I can’t promise that I wasn’t the one who hurt you,” he admitted, “because I don’t know.”
And he didn’t want to know. At the moment neither did she. She only wanted him.
His desire pumped through her veins, increasing the intensity of her own passion. Her fingers trembled as she set the holster, and her .45, onto the table beside the bed. It was mahogany, like his den, and like the king-size sleigh bed. And the dresser and the wainscoting beneath the striped wallpaper. The gun gone from her grasp, her decision made, she reached for the hem of her sweater.
He watched her, his green eyes darkening as his pupils dilated. His breath shuddered out as she lifted the light knit fabric. As she pulled the sweater over her head, the clip fell from her hair; it dropped to the floor with the sweater and her hair fell loose around her bare shoulders.
Impatience spurred his desire and hers. He dragged his black T-shirt over his head, mussing his hair even more than his hands had earlier. He reached next for the snap of his jeans, undoing it before dragging down the zipper.
Her bottom lip dropped, her breath drying its dampness, as she uttered an appreciative sigh. He was beautiful, from the sculpted muscles of his chest to the washboard abs that led to his waist. His lean hips jutted above his sagging jeans. Her heart pounded heavily. She had never wanted anyone with this intensity—not even the man with whom she’d made love in those brief flashes of old memories.
Was the intensity only because she felt his emotions in addition to her own? Her hands shook so violently she barely managed to unclasp her pants. The teeth of her zipper caught as she jerked it down. Then she wriggled out of the trousers, so that she stood before him in only her panties and bra. The lace and satin barely covered the slope of breasts or the curls between her thighs.
His breath shuddered out in a ragged sigh of appreciation. “You are so damn beautiful.”
“And crazy,” she said. “This is crazy.” But she couldn’t stop now, even if he held her gun to her head.
But then he touched her and chased the last of her doubts away with the fire of his passion. Only his fingertip brushed across her skin, gliding down her throat, over her leaping pulse to the hollow between her breasts.
She shivered, goose bumps lifting along her arms and nape. But then his hand was there, tangling in her hair. He sifted his fingers through the strands and sighed. “So damn beautiful …”
Pressure built inside her, winding tight. “Touch me,” she ordered him. “Really touch me.”
His fingertip continued down her stomach to dip into her navel. Then lower it traveled, over her stomach to the lace of her panties. That finger flicked over the center of her desire, over the tight little nub.
Passion flowed through her, pooling low in her womb, centering on that nub that he flicked again, this time with his thumb. He pressed harder.
She parted her legs, giving him access, but he moved his hand back up her body and around her back. The clasp of her bra parted. Then he pulled the straps until they slipped down her arms and the cups fell away from her breasts.
Her nipples, peaked with the desire burning inside her, tilted toward him, begging for his attention.
But he touched her only with his gaze, sliding it over her. He didn’t stop at the scar, like he had last night. It didn’t turn him off again, like it had some men before him. Instead, he only glanced at it.
“You’re teasing me,” she complained.
“I’m savoring you,” he corrected her, his voice rough with the desire she felt straining at his restraint, testing his control.
She wanted to test it, too. So she slid her hands over his chest. His heart beat fast and hard beneath her palm. Then her hands traveled lower, until her fingers dipped inside his open waistband. She reached beneath the elastic of his boxers and freed his erection. It leaped, throbbing with the intensity of his need.
A need that matched her own.
She leaned forward, so that the tips of her breasts touched his chest. The nipples rubbed against his hot skin. Soft hair stroked the sensitive points, and she arched her neck, a moan slipping free of her lips.
So he caught her off guard. His hands closed around her waist and he lifted her. Then he lowered her onto the mattress, and he followed her down, his body covering hers. His mouth found hers, biting gently at her lips until she opened them for his tongue. It slid in and out. But it wasn’t enough. Neither was the brush of his chest against her breasts.
The pressure inside her built, so intense she writhed beneath him, rubbing her hips against his erection. But her panties, however flimsy the lace, separated them. And she wanted nothing separating them. Not any garment or any doubt.
She belonged here, in his bed, beneath him….
He slid his mouth from hers, across her cheek to her ear. “I’m going to make you scream,” he warned her, his breath hot against her skin.
She shivered with fear and anticipation. Her teeth sank into her bottom lip, and she shook her head. “No …”
“I’m going to make you scream,” he said again, his eyes glittering with intent. Then he lowered his mouth, sliding it over the curve of one breast before his lips closed around the nipple. His tongue flicked across the point.
She whimpered as the pressure tightened her muscles, and she pressed her thighs together. But his hand was there, forcing them apart as he cupped her heat. His tongue continued to tease, flicking back and forth across her nipple as his fingers eased under the elastic of her panties and then inside her. His thumb rubbed the nub again.
His fingers moved, in and out. But it wasn’t enough; release eluded her. She bit harder on her lip, but another moan slipped out.
He closed his teeth around her nipple and tugged. She arched, lifting her breast against his mouth and her hips against his hand. An orgasm ripped through her, taking off the edge but not releasing that pressure. Then he moved his mouth from her breast, his tongue following the path his finger had taken earlier.
He tugged the panties off her now, lifted her legs and hooked them over his shoulders. Then he buried his face between her thighs. His mouth moved over her, his tongue flicking back and forth over her clit like it had her nipple. But he didn’t neglect her breasts; his hands cupped their fullness, his palms pressing against her nipples.
She shifted against the bed and tugged at his hair. But she didn’t pull him away. She held him to her. He slid his tongue inside her, lapping at her. She arched against his mouth and hands, and a scream of frustration tore from her throat. Then the frustration eased as another orgasm shuddered through her. And she screamed at the intensity of the pleasure.
But then she felt his frustration, his overwhelming desire for her, so acute it bordered on pain. He pulled away and kicked off his jeans. Then he dragged open the top dra
wer of the bedside table and pulled out a condom. His hand shook as he ripped it open, then rolled it onto the impressive, pulsing length of his erection. He reached for her again and pushed her legs apart. Then, with a passion edging toward frenzy, he drove inside her.
She spread her legs wide and wrapped them around his waist, trying to take all of him. Trying to take him deep. But he was too much, too big.
Too intense.
Every feeling of his pummeled her, increasing her own desire. She grasped his shoulders, clawing at the sinewy muscles. Then she rose up and kissed him, sliding her tongue into his mouth. He held it with his lips, before letting her pull away and pant for breath. Her lungs burned, needing air. But she needed him more.
He lowered his head and tugged a nipple into his mouth. As he stroked his tongue over the point, he withdrew his penis and stroked the moist tip of it over the nub of her femininity—before sliding inside her again.
She stretched, accepting more of him, taking him deeper. With each thrust she came closer to finally releasing the pressure he’d built inside her. Passion dampened her skin, making it slide against his as their bodies joined.
His passion burned inside her, hot and intense. He was close, too.
As he thrust, he reached between them, rubbing his thumb across her most sensitive spot.
And finally the pressure broke. An orgasm slammed through her, so intense that she screamed his name, her throat burning from the force and volume of her cry. He thrust again and again and again, extending her orgasm even as he climbed toward his own.
She felt his control snap, felt the red haze of passion overcome him as he thrust once more, then came. A groan tore free from his throat, raw and primal.
Her lungs still laboring for breath, she dropped back on the mattress and gasped. “That was.” Like nothing she had ever experienced before. In this life, or maybe even her last. “That was incredible.”
He grinned that arrogant grin that had fascinated even as it infuriated her. “You screamed,” he reminded her as he flopped onto his back, slid his arm around her and clutched her against his side. “Twice …”