The Marrying Kind

by Beverly Bird

  It didn’t matter that his macho arrogance made her feel safer and more protected than she’d ever felt, that it had been that way from almost the first day they’d worked together. It couldn’t matter that when his gaze moved over her body, it made her feel beautiful and cherished. It didn’t even matter that she admired his idealism and his strength and his goodness or that he could make her laugh at times when she would have sworn it was impossible. It was just sexual attraction. Period.

  “I can’t do this,” she said again.

  He seemed to think about that, then he grinned. “Actually I’d say you’re doing just fine. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “What?” she asked, dazed.

  “I have to stop by my folks’ house and pick up the key to the cabin first.”

  He finally went back to the living area and she ran after him. “Gunner, I can’t do this.” Be firm, she thought, just... be firm. He’d always respected her wishes. Eventually. Sooner or later. Most of the time.

  “Sure you can.”

  “Then we need rules,” she insisted. “If I’m going to go away with you, we have to establish a few things right from the start.”

  He went to a closet near the front door and pulled a duffel bag off the top shelf. “More fun to just make them up as we go along.”

  “Gunner!”

  He looked at her innocently.

  “I am not going to sleep with you!”

  He grinned. “Did I say anything about sleeping? Go on, Princess. Get dressed.”

  She fought the urge to stomp her foot. “You’re not taking me seriously.”

  He came back to her slowly. Suddenly his face was so intent it sent something warm through her blood.

  “I don’t think you have any idea how seriously I’m taking this,” he said finally.

  She opened her mouth and closed it again. She swallowed very carefully and searched for her voice. Then she changed the subject. Discretion suddenly seemed the better part of valor.

  “We can’t just cruise off into the sunset here, Gunner,” she tried. “We can’t just disappear. Kennery will be furious.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his jaw and scowled.

  “And we can’t just take off until we know what’s going on. Maybe they’ve even found Benami by now.”

  “We would have heard.” He paused. “I don’t want to talk to Kennery. But you’re right. Somebody needs to know what we’re up to. We need a contact to keep our finger on the pulse back here.”

  Her hand flew to her mouth as she understood what he was saying. “Kennery?” she whispered. “You think Kennery is leaking information to Benami?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Tess. And to be real honest, I don’t trust a soul right now. Call your brother,” he decided finally.

  Tessa blinked. “Jesse?”

  “Let him know where we are. And tell him why we’re not telling anyone else and to keep it under his hat. Then we’re covered. Can’t do much better than having the D.A. on our side.”

  Tessa paled. “You realty think Benami is going to come after us again? You think he’d chase us into Jersey?”

  He put his gun into the duffel bag and shot her a look. “Anything’s possible. He’s nuts.”

  She flinched, then she squared her shoulders and nodded. He watched, fascinated by the transformation from panic to courage. Then she slumped a little again.

  “I still feel like a coward, running this way,” she muttered.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I’m not real comfortable with it, either. But there’s no help for it.”

  And that was when she realized that it was just as hard for him to walk away from Benami right now. He’s doing it for me. Because he knew that if he just sent her away somewhere, she’d only come back. He was slinking off himself to keep her safe, not only from Benami, but from herself.

  This man was so much more than anything she had ever bargained for.

  “I’ll call Jesse,” she said, shaken. And she knew, as she went to the kitchen phone, that she was agreeing to much, much more than hiding for a day or two, more than laying low until Benami was found.

  They were going to New Jersey, and they had never managed to establish those rules after all.

  It took them over an hour to get across the bridge. Tessa had to stop and pick up clothes and they had to exchange the patrol car that Gunner had commandeered from the district officers the night before, and the garage attendant wasn’t happy about giving them another unmarked.

  “Man, I’ll get called on the carpet for this,” the kid said. “Everybody knows what you did yesterday, Gunner. Another one. Jeez.”

  “It’s all right, Ernie. Yesterday’s smashup wasn’t my fault.”

  “That was what you said about the bomb!” Ernie complained.

  “And Internal Affairs didn’t put that one on my record, either, did they?” He tried to reach over the kid’s shoulder into the little booth for the keyboard there. Ernie moved fast to block his way.

  “Man, I can’t. Not until Internal Affairs says it’s okay.”

  “Check it out to me, then,” Tessa suggested.

  Ernie looked at her as though seeing her for the first time. “I don’t know.” He hesitated. “I mean, technically, you’re partners, right? So giving it to you would be as bad as giving it to him.”

  “Not when I’ve never had a traffic accident in my life, much less in a city car,” she declared, then she sent a smug look to Gunner. “I promise I’ll drive.”

  “Around the block,” Gunner mouthed at her as Ernie finally turned his back to reach for a set of keys.

  “That depends on which block,” she whispered sweetly.

  Tessa could only be amazed at the way the tension seeped out of her as she turned the city car onto Route 676. They headed for the bridge and a sense of relaxation began to fill her in its stead. Relaxation ... or peace.

  Right or wrong, she’d made a decision. She couldn’t, in all honesty, say that she had changed her mind about hiding from Benami, but she knew Gunner was right. It was the safest, only sensible thing they could do under the circumstances. And she was still frightened of what was happening between them—terrified by what might yet happen—but a sweet resignation seemed to have taken her over, a feeling of inevitability.

  No matter how many times she told herself that she didn’t want him, she knew she did. And no matter how much she thought she wanted to keep her distance from him, to establish lines, she kept finding excuses to step over them and inch a little closer to him. She couldn’t fight herself anymore.

  “Which way?” she asked a little breathlessly as they came down off the bridge onto the New Jersey side of the river.

  “Right here. Pull over.”

  She felt herself grinning. “Nope.”

  He swore creatively enough to make her eyes widen.

  “I can’t even imagine that,” she mused. “How could a person do that? Is it possible?”

  “Is that a roundabout way of telling me to watch my language?”

  “Your intellect constantly amazes me.”

  “Pull over.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t just sit here,” he complained. “It’s emasculating.”

  “This is the nineties, Gunner. It’s okay for men to be sensitive. It’s okay to let women be strong. Get with the program.”

  A challenge like that, he thought, could not be ignored.

  “Which one?” he asked quietly, and his voice should have alerted her, if only because it got closer. “Which program? This one?” His mouth touched a vulnerable spot on her neck, right below her ear.

  Tessa jumped, then everything inside her went instantly liquid and warm. It left her with a feeling almost like an ache. She wanted this. She did. God help her.

  Still, she tried. “Wrong program,” she whispered.

  “Pull over,” he said again.

  “No.”

  Gunner grinned. There was something interesting going on here, he
realized. Yesterday she would have given him the wheel, if only to stop him from touching her. He had no choice but to go on, to search out her new breaking point.

  He took the diamond stud out of her ear and dropped it into the ashtray.

  “What are you doing?” she gasped.

  “Too crunchy.”

  She felt his teeth close gently on her earlobe. The ache inside her bloomed. She shrugged her shoulder in a halfhearted effort to push him away.

  “Stop... it. Gunner, I can’t—”

  “Drive? No problem. Let me do it.”

  “Nor.”

  He was amazed. And thrilled. “You realize, of course, that this refusal relieves me of all responsibility for my subsequent actions.”

  Her heart thrummed painfully. She couldn’t get air. She couldn’t answer.

  “Well, then,” he murmured into her ear. He moved closer and his broad hand came down on her thigh.

  Tessa jumped again and the car swerved. “If you make me crash, I’ll kill you.”

  “I’m already dying, sweetheart, a slow, painful death over all these lines of yours. You don’t know how they make me suffer.”

  Oh, God, she thought helplessly. He was good. Were they just smooth, polished words, ones he had used a thousand times before? Maybe not on anyone who worked for the city, she allowed, but on some women, many women, somewhere? She tried to believe it. Tried one last time to get a grip on herself and on what she had always thought to be right and wrong. Sex without love. It couldn’t work, wasn’t part of her world.

  There were other reasons this couldn’t work, other reasons she shouldn’t allow him to touch her. His hand moved up her hip. She sucked in breath. What were her reasons? She had important ones, immense ones.

  Matt. Of course, there was Matt.

  Gunner’s hand was under her sweater, sliding over her skin. She was losing Matt, couldn’t find him, couldn’t call him to mind at the moment at all, and that should have shot sense back into her system like cold water. But she couldn’t possibly be sensible when she couldn’t even think clearly.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” she gasped as his hand stroked higher, enjoying her skin.

  He dared. Oh, of course he dared. A groan escaped her as his hand closed over her breast.

  “You feel like heaven,” he said quietly.

  If she fell in love with this man—another cop—if she did that, then she lost him, it would destroy her. She was afraid.

  “Gunner.” If she told him to stop, he would stop. She knew that.

  She couldn’t bring the words up in her throat.

  “Front or back?” he asked.

  “What?” she croaked. Already his fingers were moving, skimming, searching.

  “Is the hook in the front or the back?”

  She couldn’t have answered if she had wanted to. It didn’t matter; he found it on his own.

  With the first caress of his callused palm on her bare skin, her heart stalled and she wanted desperately to close her eyes, to revel in it. Finally. It was so delicious, so intimate, almost a sweet breath of relief to have him finally touch her this way. For a moment he simply cupped the weight of her breast in his palm, but then his fingers tightened over her.

  “Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted to do this?” he asked quietly. “And more, so much more.”

  Everything coiled suddenly at the core of her, a tense ache between her legs, a need so demanding that she couldn’t bear it. She felt something almost like a sob work up in her throat.

  Gunner cracked one eye open as his mouth worked on her ear again. He watched her knuckles go white on the steering wheel.

  Too bad. He no longer wanted to drive.

  His mouth roamed down her neck, to her collar bone, and his thumb found her nipple, teasing gentle, lazy circles around it. She cried out wordlessly.

  “Better pull over,” he said again.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Maybe I should.”

  But she didn’t want to. If she pulled over, he would stop.

  “Take this exit,” he told her.

  She veered for it blindly. Horns blared behind them.

  “I want to look at you, Tess. I want to see where my hands are. I want to watch them cover you, touch you, stroke you.”

  Wanting burned, hurt, inside her. She had never wanted this way before. Never. Was it him? Or was it her? Was it the way she felt about him? Was she already in love with him? Surely not. Sexual attraction. It was just something...chemical. She had loved Matt with all her heart and soul, and he had never said things like this, had never made her feel this way.

  That was blasphemy, she realized. And God help her, it was true.

  Gunner pushed her sweater up. His hand slid over her other breast, easing her bra away from there, too. She almost missed the stop sign at the end of the exit ramp and had to hit the brakes hard.

  “Oh, Lord,” she whimpered.

  “Pull over.”

  “Yes.” She dragged in breath. “Was this all...just to get me...to stop driving?”

  “No.”

  “No,” she repeated, her voice quivering.

  “But this is.”

  “What? Oh.”

  His tongue, warm and rough, slid up the side of her bared breast just as his hand went back to her thigh again, inching higher, and then he was urging her to move her legs apart, and she couldn’t do that, not here on a secondary highway.

  She finally managed to stop the car. There was a wooded picnic area beyond a spattering of service places—a gas station, a fast-food joint, a convenience store. She scarcely saw them, but something about the trees and the gravel parking lot beckoned to her just in time, and she swerved into it.

  She moved her legs apart without conscious thought, yielding to his will as it seemed she had done from the first time she had met him. Her head fell back against the headrest. He touched her intimately, rubbing and stroking, and even through her jeans, it made her moan and yearn for more. She turned into him and his head dipped to take her breast into his mouth.

  She pushed herself into him. She was melting in his hands. And that told him more, so much more than anything she had said, any words she had spoken. This was not a woman whose body would melt unless her heart was already his.

  The knowledge exploded inside him, shattering restraint. He wanted her here, now, as badly as he had ever wanted anything in life. Not here, not the first time, not with her. A voice inside him kept trying to shout reason at him, but her eyes were half closed and smoky, and her breath had become short, little pants.

  He finally straightened. Not here. “Come here.”

  She flowed into him, flattening him against the opposite door. And then his hands were in her hair again, and his mouth found hers with an urgency that stunned him. Their hands groped, and their mouths slid as tongues explored fervently. He moved one hand to find her breast again, covering it, feeling the warm fullness of her. Her skin was rich, smooth, like satin.

  “Gunner...” One of her own hands dragged at the front of his T-shirt, searching for something she couldn’t seem to find, something she needed more than she needed air to breathe, something he had to give her. She jerked the cotton free of his jeans and drove her hand underneath it, her palm sliding over his torso, his chest, over the pelt of soft hair there.

  “Please,” she whispered. Not here.

  “Wait,” he growled.

  She couldn’t. She changed her mind. Yes, here. Now.

  But he wasn’t kissing her anymore. He put her away from him gently, with gritted teeth, and framed her face in his hands.

  “Okay, this is how we’re going to do this,” he said hoarsely. His own breath was coming fast and hard. Had she done that to him?

  Tessa managed to nod. She licked her lip nervously.

  It almost undid him, that little darting of her tongue, almost made him lose his grip on his resolve. It was a tenuous hold to begin with. He closed his eyes and fortified himself with a breath.

&nb
sp; “I’m going to drive,” he told her.

  She let out her breath and nodded again.

  “I drive fast.”

  She certainly would never argue that.

  “We’ll be there in less than an hour.”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “You have just that long to change your mind. And if you don’t, I can pretty much guarantee you that you’ll be naked before we hit the front door.”

  He forced himself to let her go, and he got out of the car.

  No, Tessa thought wildly, scooting over nervously into the passenger seat as he got behind the wheel. She had an hour to make sure she could live with the repercussions.

  Chapter 18

  It took them considerably less than an hour.

  Thirty-five minutes later, Gunner turned off the main road onto a rutted, narrow lane. They drove several more minutes in the same thick, tense silence that had gripped them since they had left the picnic area. Finally Gunner spoke again.

  “You change your mind?”

  Her voice wouldn’t come to her throat. She finally managed to shake her head.

  Gunner let out the breath that he hadn’t been aware of holding. He was stunned by how terrified, how desperately unwilling, he was to hear that she had. Because he didn’t know anymore where he would find the willpower to respect her wishes. He’d taken a step too close to easily pull back this time.

  “Okay,” he said hoarsely. “All right. Will you please take that sweater off?”

  That brought her voice back. She looked at him quickly, blushing again. “What? Here?”

  “We’re here.”

  He turned the car suddenly onto a gravel path. There was a tiny cabin at the end of it, all rough-wood siding and a steep roof. A chimney shot up from one side. She could just make out a thin ribbon of cold, gray water behind it.

  Gunner stopped the car. Her gaze swung back to him. His eyes burned into hers.

  “I mean it, Princess. Last call. Last chance for those lines of yours.”

  “I know,” she whispered.