by Beverly Bird
Oh, God.
She had no choice but to lean into his back. He was crouched, and her thighs were flush against his shoulders. Every time he moved, reached, shifted, he rubbed against her, shooting little frissons of sensation down her limbs.
She choked. If she laughed, it would be a crazy sound, ringing off the walls.
This was absurd. It was impossible. They were breaking in. She was doing something that could forever wreck her career, that could bring her family no end of bad press. And here she was getting fidgety and warm inside over her partner in crime, with all her thoughts centered on the way his body felt pressed against her legs.
“What?” she asked hoarsely. He was saying something. God help her, he was talking to her and she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.
“I asked you where he got the rope to tie her hands. When he went to look for it, she could have fled, gotten away.”
“He already had some attached to the chandelier, ready and waiting for her. When she saw that, she knew what he intended. That was when she went wild.”
“Right. But Angie said that the fibers on her hands were different from those at her throat.”
Tessa thought about that. Then she went on, fast, excitedly. “It wasn’t a gun. He used a knife to coerce her, Gunner. He had that On him, so he was able to cut the rope away from the chandelier, the one that he’d originally planned to hang her with. He used it on her arms instead.”
Even in the darkness, she could see him grinning when he straightened away from the refrigerator. She let the button go in the split second it took him to close the door again. She stepped back, putting space between them just as quickly.
“Yeah,” he agreed, turning again to work on the freezer. “But if he just tied her arms, she still could have run.”
She had to hold the freezer light out, too. Tessa gritted her teeth and leaned into him again.
“He tied her to something,” she said. “To something big, heavy, immovable.”
“The table’d be my guess.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Mine, too.”
“While she was tied to the table, he went to get another rope.” Gunner took over the scenario they were creating. “It was the second rope that actually hung her. And it turned out to be different in composition from the first one. He probably got the sedatives then, too.”
“By now it’s probably close to seven-thirty,” Tessa whispered.
“Right,” Gunner agreed.
“And if he’s too late getting to the party, that’s something people would notice.”
“So he’s running out of time. Better to revamp his game plan.”
“Drug her—”
“Secure the tie—”
“Appear at the party—”
“And at about eight-fifteen, after making damn sure everybody knows he’s there, Benami slips out again.” Gunner paused. “No knives in the freezer. Let’s try the living room furniture and that thing holding the tea set in the parlor.”
Tessa stepped back quickly again to let him move. She realized that he had a second sack pushed into the waist of his jeans. This one was empty. He shook it out, and before he left the kitchen, he went to examine some knives stuck in a wood block on the counter. There was a paring knife small enough to handle easily, with a lethal blade that could have cut through rope, or have intimidated someone far braver than Daphne. He dropped it into the sack.
“Gunner, he’ll notice it’s missing! We can’t—”
“He misplaced it,” he said mildly and finally left the kitchen. Tessa moved fast to keep close to him.
“So he leaves the party again,” Gunner resumed, nosing through the parlor, lifting various odds and ends and peering into drawers. “He hotfoots it back here. No cabs. That’s too risky, like we agreed before. He probably took one there the first time, though, because he was running late.”
“We’ll check,” Tessa agreed.
“So at about eight-thirty, given that we figure it took him about seven minutes to make the trip on foot, Daphne would be good and groggy. She would have had the sedatives in her for about an hour by then.”
“And that was when he hanged her,” Tessa said. “Angela said she’d ingested the drugs roughly an hour and a half before she died.”
“Yeah.”
Nothing seemed to jump out at them in either the parlor or the living room. Gunner took a small plastic bag and a razor blade from his wallet. He finally proceeded into the dining room. This time he didn’t rummage around, looking for a weapon. He went directly to the table.
“Give this thing a shove, Princess.”
She understood immediately what he was getting at. She went to the table. It was huge, heavy mahogany and would probably seat at least twelve. By leaning her hips against it and using her legs for leverage, she was just able to budge it.
If Daphne had been tied to one of the legs, with her arms behind her, growing increasingly groggy, there was no way she would be able to drag this table anywhere, Tessa thought. She would have been helpless, agonizingly aware of what was going to happen to her when her husband came back. She wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.
Fury pounded through Tessa.
“Easy there, Princess,” Gunner cautioned.
She realized she had given the table an extra push, scooting it a good four inches in her anger. She flushed and tried pulling it back toward her, looping her wrists around a leg. It was harder that way. Both she and Gunner had to work together to bring the table back to its original position.
No, Daphne would not have been able to move it, no matter how desperate she was.
Gunner went down to his knees, working around each leg. He took the razor and scraped at the carpet in each place, pushing minuscule and invisible particles into the plastic bag, then he folded it and put it back in his wallet.
“With any luck, no one’s vacuumed in here these past few days,” he muttered.
“Gunner, how are we ever going to get this analyzed?” she whispered helplessly. “What are we supposed to tell Forensics about how we got it?”
He shrugged. “One of the district cops who took the call is a friend of mine.”
“So?” she hissed.
“So he got it when he was here the first time around.”
“So what’s he been doing sitting on it these past few days?”
“He didn’t. He gave it to me. I misplaced it.”
“Chain of evidence,” she snapped. “What could have happened to it while it was missing? Oh, Gunner, I just don’t know about this.”
“I put it in my locker and forgot about it. I know where it was the whole time.”
She smiled a little. “Boy, are you going to catch hell.”
“Yeah.” When he straightened, she saw that he was grinning, too.
“And Basil English the Fourth is going to make mincemeat of you on the stand, assuming we even get that far,” she said.
“Well, I’ll work on it, come up with something better. I just thought of that off the top of my head.” He looked around the dining room and went to check the breakfront. “Okay, we’re done here. Let’s check their bedroom.”
They started for the stairs. They were on the second floor landing when they heard noise at the front door.
Tessa panicked. In a single heartbeat, all the blood she possessed seemed to sluice right down to her toes. Her heart kept it there, exploding from a few staccato beats into something so fast that no blood could possibly come back into it.
“Oh, my God!” she yelped. Keys. She heard the distant but distinct metallic jingle of keys. “Gunner! It’s him!”
Gunner was gone. She reached for him and flailed at air.
She caught sight of his shadow moving down the hall and she took off after him, her legs wobbling with terror. He stopped dead in the doorway of the first bedroom they came to, and she plowed into him from behind, skittering backward a few steps.
“Do something!” she cried quietly. “
Gunner, do something!”
He let out a long stream of invectives that more or less indicated he was trying.
The bedroom was the master. Definitely not a good place to hide, Tessa thought wildly. But it was too late. She heard the door open downstairs. Footsteps come into the entryway. “What’s he doing?” she moaned in a whisper, barely audible.
“Do you want to ask him?” Gunner snapped in an undertone.
She was going to kill him. “You never gave me my gun back!”
He finally clapped a hand over her mouth to shut her up.
Just in time. The footsteps were coming up the stairs now. Tessa knew she would have screamed. Instead, with Gunner’s palm flush over her mouth, over her nostrils, she could scarcely breathe.
No more time. They darted together into the bedroom, across it to the master bath, bumping into each other, fumbling in the darkness. Tessa beat at Gunner’s hand to get him to take it away from her face.
The shower curtain was heavy, some kind of dark, satiny material, with a somewhat lighter liner. Each side of the curtain itself was drawn back into a tie on either side of the tub. Gunner and Tessa dove in. She wondered wildly if they made any noise. Surely they had, some swish, some rustle. Where was Christian?
She answered herself a moment later. He was in the master bedroom. She could hear him moving around in there through the open bathroom door.
Gunner pressed a hand against her shoulder and motioned to the bottom of the tub. Down, he wants me to get down, maybe Christian can see our shadows through the liner, if he comes in here I am purely going to die. She eased down and squirmed to the back behind the heavier, outer curtain.
In the next moment, Gunner was literally on top of her.
It took every bit of her will not to make a sound. Her heart was hammering hard enough to leave her chest. She was kneeling, but leaning back at an unnatural angle, her spine pressed to the porcelain. And Gunner faced into her, a knee wedged down on either side of her hips. His arms were tight against her shoulders as he braced his weight. There was no way he could give her her gun now, no way they could even move.
Her heart galloped harder, almost painfully, even as terror swept through her as if it were numbing ice. And impossibly, in spite of that, awareness suddenly shot through her again. It was hot, liquid, stealing her breath. Christian would almost certainly find them. And all she could think of was Gunner on top of her.
His scent. That woodsy aura, clean and sharp, somehow green. It was like a silent forest just before dawn before the birds came alive, she thought. He was too close to her. There was no escaping it.
His legs. Splayed around her, over her, his hips straddling hers, pressing against her intimately, like tangled lovers. If they had been unclothed it would have taken no more than a shifting of his weight to slide inside her.
Don’t think about it.
His weight was solid, strong, bearing into her, making her turn her face to the side to inhale, and then her cheek was flush against his chest and she could hear his heart beating.
It was steady. How could it be steady?
Then she felt him rub his cheek over her hair.
He was trying to calm her. On some level, she knew that. He was just being Gunner. He was easing her terror the only way he could under the circumstances, with a silent touch, but it started a strange ache inside her again, a poignant hunger for something more, something different than what he intended.
Sound came from just outside the shower curtain. Benami was in the bathroom. The medicine cabinet opened and closed.
She turned her head, burying her mouth against Gunner’s chest to keep from crying out. Her arms came up hard around his waist, almost of their own volition, holding him, holding on.
She was trembling. Gunner felt the little tremors scoot through her body, and it hurt something inside him because he had dragged her into this. Then Benami left the bathroom again and he realized her shudders had changed. They weren’t panicked any longer. They were deeper than that. Her breath hitched, and it didn’t sound terrified any longer.
For a moment, they stayed very still.
He felt her take in air, dragging it greedily into her lungs. He felt her breasts push against his chest with the effort. It was as though she was absorbing the nearness of him, taking him in greedily with the air.
Ah, hell.
He closed his eyes and cursed silently for Benami to get on with it. Get what you came back for and get the hell out of the bedroom. Now, fast, before I lose it.
Too late.
He could tell himself that he didn’t really want this woman for all the reasons that were becoming a litany to him by now. That she didn’t want him. He could tell himself that she wasn’t ready, that he wasn’t serious enough for her, didn’t know how to be serious about a woman. But his face was still in her hair—flowers, springtime, soft and easy—and his body wanted her. He wanted her with sudden, pounding urgency, and his body took the cue and ran with it.
He felt himself hardening against her. She was so close. She assaulted all of his senses. A subdued groan escaped him. With the way they were sitting, those sweet, blushing, ladylike lines of hers were about to get blown clear to hell, and what would she do about that?
What she did was wriggle. His head swam. His heart pounded.
Tessa heard his heartbeat change. Not steady anymore, she thought. No, it was wild now, and it wasn’t because Benami had come closer—had he? No, she couldn’t hear him out there anymore, couldn’t be sure where he was now, but she knew the man had nothing to do with why Gunner’s heartbeat had changed. She knew it with every instinct she possessed, with instincts as old as womankind. She knew it and craved, knew it and wanted, knew it and ached.
She felt him growing hard against her. It was delicious, intimate... crazy.
Her own heart started to thunder again. She looked up at him pleadingly and could barely see his face in the darkness. Tell me it’s me, Gunner, tell me this wouldn’t happen with any woman you got trapped in a bathtub with.
But of course, it would have. He was John Gunner.
“I think he’s gone,” Gunner said in a husky whisper. “I haven’t heard him in a while.”
“Gone,” she managed to reply vacantly.
“I’m going to get up now.”
“Good.” Bad, don’t go, stay here, touch me, I don’t care why.
What was she doing? What was she thinking?
Unbidden came thoughts of Matt, images clearer than they had been for months now, his face, his eyes, and the sense of guilt that swept through her now was so much more painful than it had been when she had stared at his picture earlier tonight. She shoved Gunner hard and frantically.
He eased his weight backward until he could crouch, then stand. He watched her almost warily for a second. His breath was still coming too fast, too harshly. It filled the small enclosure, making her own throat close. It could have been any woman trapped beneath him, she told herself again. Any woman. And the same thing would have happened.
Gunner felt amazed, rocked, a little bit scared. Okay, so she was pretty and classy and sweet. Blue-blooded and off limits. But how the hell could she turn him on like that under these circumstances?
It was the air of the forbidden, he decided. That was all. That was why he had reacted in such a place, in a way he never had and never would have reacted before. Sure, he loved women, but he loved himself more.
Finally, silently, he eased the curtain open. He motioned to Tessa to stay put for a moment. He stepped out of the tub.
Tessa waited in agony. Because of what had happened, because of what might still happen if he was wrong, if Benami was still out there.
Dear God, she hadn’t even heard the man leave!
Gunner stuck his head back into the shower. “Okay,” he whispered. “Coast is clear.”
“He’s downstairs,” she said in an undertone.
“No. I don’t think so. I think he left again while we were...never mind.
”
Tessa crept out of the tub. Gunner opened the medicine cabinet quickly and quietly.
“I want to get out of here, Gunner. Please.”
“Soon,” he said quietly.
She watched him take a single pill from each of the little bottles he found in the medicine cabinet. He dropped them into the sack, too. He went back into the bedroom, and she hurried after him. One of the dresser drawers was still open. Benami had come back for something in that drawer, Tessa thought. Gunner went to it and rummaged through it. After a moment he held up a money clip. He had come back for cash.
Gunner finished with a quick, superficial search of the bedroom. After a moment, though she was still shaky, she began to help him to hurry things along, to make their hunt as comprehensive as possible. Of all the rooms in the house, this was the most likely to contain something the man might have hidden. Everyone hid things in their bedrooms.
They looked under the mattress, in the closet, in every drawer. Gunner went back into the bathroom and took a quick peek into the toilet tank. He glanced back at Tessa and shook his head. Nothing. He motioned to the hallway, to the stairs.
They left the bedroom and crept down. Benami was no longer on the ground floor, either.
Tessa didn’t start shaking—really shaking—until they got outside again. Then the adrenaline rushed out of her. She leaned weakly against the wall of Benami’s house.
“Oh, my God,” she said tremulously, then something else dawned on her. “All that for nothing!”
Gunner began walking without her. “Not quite nothing,” he said when she hurried to catch up. “We got the knife—”
“But Angela Byerly never said anything about her having been cut anywhere! We don’t even know if that’s the one he used to coerce her!”
They reached the car.
“Even if he just poked her with it, there could still be skin cells on it or something,” Gunner insisted. “Anyway, hell, I didn’t expect to find the other rope laying there on his bed, for God’s sake.” And then he fell silent.
He was going to talk about it, she realized, about what had happened in that tub. Was he embarrassed? No way, she thought, not John Gunner.