Ten
“YOU DID WHAT?” Elgin asked, his voice rising to a very unmasculine squeak as he half-rose off his bar stool. A look of profound confusion and instant anger vied for control of his facial expression.
“Tommy and I had a little financial discussion this afternoon,” Kelly repeated simply. She disregarded his agitation as she moved down the length of the bar, providing fresh napkins, drinks, and clean ashtrays where she saw the need.
It was Friday night, traditionally a busy night in nearly every tavern in the world. It was Friday night, and prior to their Atlantic City date and the accident, Elgin had claimed the night for himself, prophesying that their attraction for each other would have to be satisfied by then.
He’d been right about that, Kelly mused. What they felt was as clear as the crystal that lined the shelves behind the bar; it was as potent and intoxicating as 190 proof grain alcohol. But he was wrong about Tommy Shaw.
She had meant to tell Elgin earlier about her conversation with Tommy, but one thing had lead to another and…
Late that afternoon, finished with the city duties that were part of his facade but still on the federal payroll, Elgin had burst into her apartment like a male adolescent in heat. No sooner had she opened the door to his insistent knocking, she’d found herself smothering in an impassioned kiss that had her weak-kneed and reeling in seconds.
“Hi,” he’d said, still holding her close, his lips brushing hers.
“Hi,” she’d murmured, opening her eyes lethargically to glimpse the fire and delight in his. It was a look she’d come to know. She cherished it, thrilled to it, looked forward to it.
“How’s your head?” he asked. “Still stiff and achy?”
She loved the little furrows that formed between his brows when he was worried, the gentle lines of love around his eyes and mouth when he was being understanding and supportive. Aw, hell. She just plain loved him. Everything about him was precious to her. His strengths and weaknesses, his mannerisms and expressions, the touch of his hand and the sound of his voice.
In that instant, she tried to view her life without him. An emptiness like none she’d ever known before echoed in her heart. He was a cop. His presence in her life could be terminated at any future moment. His loss could cause her untold pain and grief, and yet, somehow it didn’t matter anymore. What happened tomorrow held no significance in what they were sharing today. The warmth of his arms and the peace in her soul stifled her fears and misgivings.
“I’m fine,” she said softly, her throat tight as she realized his importance in her life.
“Great.” His grin revealed ingenuous-looking dimples that belied the gleam in his eyes. He sank his teeth into the soft flesh of her neck, nibbling and kissing as he made fast work of the buttons down the front of her shirt. “I want to make love to you so bad, I feel like I’m going crazy. All day long I kept seeing you on the streets, in restaurants, in shops, in the backseat of a cab. Everywhere I looked, you were there.”
“Maybe you should get your eyes checked,” she said, giggling as she let him guide her toward her bedroom, his mouth taking possession of newly exposed flesh at every step.
“Maybe I should make love to you so long and so hard that I get you out of my system,” he muttered against her skin.
“Maybe I won’t let that happen,” she said, growing serious, her susceptibility to his touch intensifying. “Maybe the longer and harder we make love, the more you’ll want me. Maybe I’ll become your drug of choice. You’ll be a Kelly-junkie, and I’ll support your habit.”
“I’m already hooked, sweetheart.” He released the clasp of her bra and tossed the garment aside like a candy wrapper. “I was a Kelly-junkie the moment I laid eyes on you. You’re in my blood. I get high just thinking about you.”
He palmed her left breast to feel her heart beating rapidly beneath his fingers. His gaze locked with hers.
“I could overdose again and again and never get enough,” he said, moving his face closer to hers. He pulled back abruptly. “What’s this? Are you crying?”
“No.” Tears spilled and rolled down her cheeks.
“Aw, jeez. Don’t cry.” She lowered her head, and he bent to keep her face in view. “How can you smile and cry at the same time? You’re not unhappy, right? You’re happy. Please don’t cry anymore. Tell me what to say to make you stop. I never know what to say to crying women.”
She looked up at him, brown eyes shimmering with tears and gladness. “You could tell this one that you love her.”
His brows rose in mild surprise.
“That’s all it would take? I love you?” His grin was reassuring, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. A shadow of concern blocked its path. “I’m a cop, Kelly,” he reminded her.
“I know.”
The shadow lifted, and in his unfettered delight she saw her eternity, filled with laughter and contentment.
“And all I have to do,” he asked, “to get you to smile, is say I love you?” She nodded. “I’m nuts about you wouldn’t work, huh?” She shook her head. “Touching you makes me wildly, passionately insane wouldn’t do either, I suppose?”
“Nope,” she said, toppling them both backward onto the bed. “I want the real thing. The dreaded L word.”
“I like you a lot?”
She punched him.
“I want us to live together until we die? I want to lavish you with kisses? I lust for your body with my every thought? My libido is out of control?”
They kissed playfully. Their words were teasing as they tickled each other out of the rest of their clothes. The heat of the day settled on them, mingling with the warmth of their clinging bodies.
“You light up my life?” he tried.
She had him weak with laughter and at her mercy, her hands positioned to dig at his ribs again for that one, when suddenly she was laid out beneath him and lamenting her rash behavior. The fun and games were over; he wasn’t bent on getting his share of rollicking revenge.
He perused her face meticulously, with a gaze that was deeply green and somber. He swallowed hard and reached out to touch her red hair, curling in a mass across the pillow.
“I do love you, Kelly Branigan.”
“I love you, too, Elgin.”
“I want kids,” he said as if he were skating on thin ice.
“Okay,” she said.
“I still want to be governor someday.”
“You can do that.”
“That means the D.A.’s office and a few lean years starting out.”
“I’m used to lean.” She paused, then added, “I’d really like to use my degree someday. With kids maybe, I’ve been thinking about adoption agencies.”
“You’d be great at it.” He placed a proud, sweet kiss on her lips. “We’re settled then. It’s you and me against the rest of the world, huh?”
“Looks like it.” She grinned. She’d get him down on one knee later. For the moment, it was nice to have the preliminaries out of the way and to know that he was as skittish as she was.
However nervous they were about the decision they’d made for the future, there wasn’t a doubtful bone in their bodies that they belonged together at that moment. Nothing shy or uncertain marred their loving.
Together they set forth on a journey taken by thousands and thousands of other lovers, but a voyage new and unexplored to them. Each bend in the road, every new angle of the path held a deep sensation, disclosed a profound conception, and altered their existence. It wasn’t an expedition one could or would want to take alone. Yet at times they passed through the unknown as a solitary unit, when their spirits converged, their bodies merged, and their hearts fused, beating as one.
Elgin watched as Kelly worked her way down the bar, seemingly ignorant of his impatience and of how much she’d come to mean to him. Every time he touched her or looked at her, he felt as if he connected with something new and vital within himself. It was as if she were rapidly taking over his life’s core, making hi
s heart beat, his lungs breathe. It annoyed him…and it frightened him beyond belief that she would risk her life—his life—by confronting Tommy Shaw with a “little financial discussion.”
“Dammit, Kelly,” he said when she returned to make change at the cash register. She held a one-minute finger up to his stormy visage before she returned the change, served a shot and a beer, stole a bowl of mixed nuts, and walked back to face him with a smug smile.
“Here, have a nut and relax, will you?” she said, setting the bowl in front of him. “I was the soul of discretion. I haven’t lived with cops all my life and not learned anything. I didn’t even mention your name.”
He didn’t speak, nor did his expression change. He was wondering where he could have her locked up and kept safe until the investigation was over. He knew she wouldn’t listen to his warnings about Shaw. The man could rob her at gunpoint and she’d still never believe he was guilty of anything.
“Elgin. Stop looking at me like that. I was very careful…and you’re about to look very foolish.”
“Is that right?”
She leaned as far across the bar as she could to keep their conversation private. He braced his elbows on the bar and covered the rest of the distance.
“I told him,” she whispered, “I’d saved some money and wanted to invest it, that I didn’t know anything about the stock market, stuff like that. And you’ll never guess what he said.”
“I’m not exactly in a guessing mood,” Elgin muttered, his eyes narrowing dangerously, his anger feeding on memories of past experiences with desperate men.
She smiled at his needless worry. “He laughed and said he was the wrong person to ask about saving money. His specialty is spending money. He said if it weren’t for Angie, they’d be living in the poorhouse. Two weeks after they got married she took over the checkbooks, and she gives him fifty dollars a week to keep in his pocket.” Kelly laughed. “He says he never makes it the entire week on fifty dollars, that he has to come in here at least twice a week to get a free lunch.”
“And that’s what you’ve based his innocence on? Against all the other information we have on him, his coming in here twice a week for lunch makes him innocent?” Elgin shook his head. “Won’t wash, babe.”
“But it’s true. I had to lend him money for Angie’s birthday gift last year. I could have told you that last night except you had me so flustered with all this nonsense in the first place. He never has money anymore. Not like when we were kids. And Angie’s very money conscious. I do believe she handles all their money and I can’t picture him bringing home thousands of stolen dollars and saying, ‘Here, Angie, hide all this money in the grocery account. I’ll steal more and we can buy a house and two new cars,’ can you?”
“It’s not just the house and cars. It’s all the other stuff and the house and cars, all at once. They’re living from paycheck to paycheck one month, and six months later they’re relatively loaded? How do you explain that?” He wanted her to see reason, yet regretted that he was the one who was going to have to show her that her love had been misplaced in Tommy Shaw.
“Angie cashed in a large bond, a large dividend payment, or something. I don’t know. All I do know, is that Tommy didn’t do it.” She finished in a rush as her attention was drawn to her grandfather.
“I wouldn’t have a vending machine in my bar if they paid me!” Mike Branigan was shouting, nose-to-nose with Imogene.
“I’ll take this one,” Elgin said, winking at her before he slipped off his stool and walked to the old man’s side.
She watched him for a few seconds to make sure he could handle her grandfather’s current tirade, then backed up against the counter to catch a few moments of rest. Her head was beginning to throb, but not anything like it had the day before. In fact, she looked worse than she felt, which was why she had begged out of her date with Elgin and decided to work in the bar instead.
It would have been nice to spend the evening curled up in Elgin’s arms on the couch upstairs, but the plain truth of it was that she had a bad case of cabin fever and wanted to get out of the apartment…but not so far away that she’d have strangers staring at her bruises. The bar had seemed the most likely place to make her bruise debut. The lights were dim and the viewers were mostly friends. She did, however, have every intention of going out in public with Elgin, just once, before the bruises faded and explaining to everyone they saw that he had beat her—simply to see the look on his face.
First, she had to decide on a way to get him out of his present frame of mind. He was like a dog with a new bone where Tommy was concerned, and his worrying about her welfare was threatening to put permanent furrows in his handsome brow. She had to convince him that he was on the wrong track, that Del Rio was the man to be watching. It made her skin crawl to think of the times she’d been alone in a room with Del Rio, and that he might be the person who’d come so close to killing her in the stairwell.
She gratefully locked the front door when the last customer had lumbered off into the night, but it would have taken a bigger man than Elgin to get her to admit that he’d been right. She shouldn’t have tried to work the entire evening.
Her head was all hammers and anvils again by the time he forced two aspirin on her and insisted she take a long bath to relax while he cleaned up the bar. He poured half a bottle of bubble bath in the tub for added enticement.
“You’re sure that’s all he said?” he asked her a while later, leaning against the vanity in the bathroom and watching her bathe. He was naked from the waist up, his own concession to the heat, as he once again went over the details of her attack.
“It all happened so fast,” she said. “He might have said more, but I didn’t hear it. I did hear him walk back toward the alley door, though, when he left. Or at least, I think that’s when he left. I passed out after that.”
“And the alley door locks automatically,” Elgin said more to himself than to her. “It has to be someone who knows his way around the bar. The front and back exits were covered the minute you entered the building, and Bailey swears he’d have known if there was someone still inside the bar after closing. So, it has to be someone who knows how to get in through the back—after closing and before you got home. It wasn’t a forced entry, so who else has keys to this place?”
“No one. Just Papa, Bailey, and me.”
“Not Shaw?”
“Tommy wouldn’t ever do something like that to me. It doesn’t have anything to do with him. And, no, he doesn’t have a key.”
“You don’t know for sure, Kelly. There are a zillion ways he could have had a duplicate made without your knowledge. Will you please do me a favor and stay away from that guy until this mess is cleared up?”
“Oh, Elgin,” she said, exasperated.
“Don’t, oh Elgin me,” he said, kneeling beside the bathtub. “This is twice now that I’ve come too close to losing you. The first time, because I was doing my job too well, the second time, because I wasn’t doing it well enough. There won’t be a third time, Kelly. I want your promise that you’ll stay away from Shaw and Del Rio for the next few days.”
“Why the next few days?”
“Because I’m still working the scam from my end, and the department’s coming at them from the other side. One way or another, they’re going to be forced to show their hands real soon. They’re cornered and they know it. They’re getting desperate.” He took a shank of her wet hair and draped it back over her shoulder. “So am I. I want that promise.”
“Well,” she said thoughtfully. “The promise to stay away from Del Rio is easy, because I don’t care much for him, anyway. But staying away from Tommy is going to cost you, Baker.”
He frowned, then let it slip away when he saw the mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
“How much?” he asked, suspicious in a most dramatic way.
“First, you have to let me out of this tub. I can’t make any hard-core demands surrounded by bubbles.”
Without
looking away from her, he pulled a towel from the rod on the wall and stood up. He held the towel for her, inviting her to step into it.
Kelly rose up out of the bubbles and let him wrap the towel and his arms around her. He simply held her for several long moments and with the lightest, most intimate touch, he wiped the bubbles and beads of water from her back and buttocks, from her arms and her breasts. On one knee, he removed the moisture from her navel with his tongue, then he kissed her there. To one side and the other, then lower and lower his kisses scorched her skin.
She felt the world closing in around them. It narrowed itself to one place, one moment. She reached out to touch him so they couldn’t be separated and she wouldn’t be lost in the vortex of time and sensation his touch generated. Acute delight caused a moan in the back of her throat. She gasped and felt her heart stand still, paralyzed with pleasure.
“What the hell is that?” Elgin asked suddenly, the tone of his voice leaving no doubt about his annoyance. “Who the hell would be calling at this time of night?”
“I don’t know,” she said, trying to sound coherent when her mind was soft and fuzzy. Hardly thinking, she took the towel from him and wrapped it around herself as she sidestepped him to answer the call.
She stopped short in the doorway.
“What if it’s him?” she whispered, the terror rising up in her once again. “What if he knows I haven’t stopped seeing you? What if he—”
“Don’t, Kelly,” Elgin snapped at her, more to get her attention than with true irritation. He was beside her in an instant, her forearms in a tight grip. “Don’t let him do this to you. He isn’t going to call to make an appointment, or to threaten you. He’s never going to touch you again. I promise. Don’t let him mess with your mind, babe. Don’t let him.”
Kiss Me, Kelly Page 14