But he hadn’t. He wouldn’t.
He was trying to be as honest with her as he was with himself, when what he wanted was to place his fingertips against her door, press and shove the damned thing against the wall.
But he wouldn’t do that, either.
She had to open her door and invite him into her home, her body, her soul.
Finding himself in front of her door, he had opened himself and allowed her to see his need. With eyes narrowed against the moonlight and porch light, he watched her as she read the intensity he no longer hid from her.
Her eyelashes fluttered. They were pointed with gold in the light.
She pushed her hair away from her face, and the tip of one earlobe showed through the shining brown strands. A shudder rushed through him like a wave crashing onto the beach and rushing back out to sea. He craved the taste of that delicate lobe. It would be sweeter than peaches, softer than silk. It would taste of gold and sunshine and life everlasting. He wanted to take it between his teeth and scrape it lightly, gently until she shivered.
Instead, he said simply, “May I come in?”
Her gaze locked on his, she nodded and unhooked the chain. She moved to the side and the door swung slowly open, but it was still a barrier between them.
“Are you sure?” He waited. He wouldn’t take that first step through her door until he believed she was certain she wanted him in her home.
He couldn’t. Because there would always be tomorrow.
“Oh, yes.” Her voice quavered, and he could hear her pulse beating in her veins, crying to him with its hunger. “I’m sure.”
Against his mouth that pulse would be hot, strong. He could make the blue-veined line at the base of her neck clamor against his mouth with yearning and need and pleasure, until she craved him the way he craved her.
He knew how. But not without her permission, and so, giving her a final chance to turn him away, he asked her once more, “Are you sure, Ms. Harris?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” His curiosity surfaced, as always, even now. “Why me? Why tonight?”
She drew herself up to her full five feet something. Light flashed in her eyes as she said fiercely, “Because there’s been enough fear and death in my life to last me forever. I want to feel alive again, even if it’s only for tonight. I need to remind myself that life goes on, that I’m a part of it.” Her voice shook with her vehemence. “I need to be alive again.”
“You want to use me?” he asked, drawing on politeness to cover the aching bleakness.
“Isn’t that why you showed up? So that you wouldn’t be alone tonight? Who’s using whom?” She stood erect, tension and strain pulling her skin tight over her face, her intensity matching his as she played with the words she’d used earlier.
“Two lonely people clinging together in the face of death and disaster? Is that why you’re letting me in? Is that what this would be? Charming,” he said, mockery tingeing his voice despite his effort.
“Would that be horrible? To—” she raised her hands helplessly “—share the loneliness, to get through the night? Together?”
“I would be honored.” And he would be. It wasn’t what he wanted from her, but it would do for tonight. He sketched a bow.
“Honored?” She frowned. “How formal you are, Detective. Your language, your manners…. Old-fashioned, almost.” She reached toward the door, and he wondered if she might shut it in his face after all, even at this point.
“My mother and I lived with my grandmother after my father died. My grandmother didn’t speak English until she was an adult. She was Guatemalan Indian. Old-fashioned in her own way. I learned English from her.” He thought of the threshold as a line of demarcation between the gallery porch and her living room, and he stayed on the gallery side, wracked with need, waiting.
“But under those old-fashioned manners, you’re also relentless, ruthless and dangerously persistent.” She took a deep breath, and the satin fabric shimmered over her breasts and dipped into the soft indentation of her belly button. “Had enough compliments, Detective?” Her face, pink and white and radiant, shone with gentle mockery of her own.
As impossible as it was, in that second he liked her as much—no, more—than he craved her, and so, surprised once more, Harlan answered her in kind. “My ego can handle it. I’m not a boy. I haven’t been for a long, long time.” He paused and smiled as her eyes widened. “I don’t need someone blowing smoke at me. Go on, Ms. Harris. Please. You have my attention.”
“There’s something merciless about you, too, Detective.”
“Yes.” He dipped his head in acknowledgment of her hit. “I’m that, too.”
“I have no doubt that no matter what happens between us tonight, you could arrest me tomorrow or the next day and it wouldn’t make any difference to you.” Her eyes, with that innocence shining in them, begged him not to lie.
He wouldn’t have, anyway.
“Yes, no matter what we do together, I wouldn’t hesitate to arrest you if I had to.” He knew it sounded curiously like a promise. At last he let himself touch her face, a reward for honesty when lies would have been easier. “But,” he said softly, “it would make a difference, Ms. Harris, believe me.”
“You could have lied. I wondered if you would.” Behind the innocence and loneliness, sadness surfaced in her face.
Wondering if she knew how much he’d revealed with his answer, he slid his palm down her neck, over her collarbones, down the slope of her shoulder and caught her hand loosely, letting it lie in his. “But you haven’t answered my question. Why me?”
She looked at their joined hands.
“Because you can’t ‘help yourself?”’ He gave a derisive spin to the words.
“That would be the worst reason, wouldn’t it?” She couldn’t look at him. “To be so enthralled that you were helpless, all rational thought and control gone, vanished, leaving you at the mercy of another?”
“Yes.” He willed her to look at him. When she did, he added, “I wouldn’t want you helpless and at my mercy. I want you involved, as needy as I am, both of us lost in each other but knowing the way back.”
“I want you for all the reasons I said. And because, God help me, some primitive part of me trusts you. Isn’t that crazy? I insult you, and then I tell you I trust you!”
“I will give you whatever I can, Ms. Harris. But I won’t lie to you.”
“I know,” she said, and closing her fingers over his, she drew him over the sill. “But under the circumstances, Detective, do you think you might call me Molly?”
“Molly.” He left his hand in hers. “Will you share tonight with me?”
“Yes, John Harlan, I will.” Slamming and locking the door behind him, he was three strides into her house before she finished, “Because I don’t want to be alone tonight. Because I need you. And because I choose to.”
Wrapping his arms around her, he swept her up against him and felt her slim arms slide around his waist. A hard lump in the pocket of her nightshirt bumped against him as he lifted her off her toes and pulled her legs tight against him.
Blindly, eyes shut, his face buried in the sweet-smelling tendrils of her hair, he made his way across her living room and to the stairs. He wanted to go slow, he wanted to stretch out the moments and he couldn’t.
His control snapped.
Frenzied with the need to take her, to close her around him, he lowered her, her back against the wall of the staircase. His skin, where it brushed hers, seemed to sink into hers, to meld and become one with her cool skin that warmed, heated, burned as he touched. He needed to be within her, have her body grow soft and supple around him, accept him. Only then would he find ease from the desolate loneliness that invaded his soul. Knowing he shouldn’t, knowing that what he was doing was wrong, knowing he’d fought and lost against the hunger driving him to Molly Harris, Harlan thought perhaps a merciful god would find pity and forgive him.
And if there were no mercy in h
eaven?
Her skin was hot under his palm, the feel of her belly softer than velvet.
Sliding his hand over her thigh, he pushed the satiny nightshirt to her waist. The shiny fabric of high-cut white panties gleamed against the matte white of her skin. Her right leg, bent at the knee, rested on the stair tread, her left sprawled below him as he bent to her.
He glimpsed the butt of the gun, dark against her nightshirt, and, not turning her loose, closed one hand around it. With his arm still wrapped around her, he lifted it free of her pocket, the butt between his fingers and her back.
“The Luger,” she said, running her fingers over his mouth. Her other hand pulled at the waist of his jeans, stopped, tugged again, popping the metal stud. Her words rushed forward on a long, drawn-out breath as he cupped her supple calf and stroked the underside of her knee. “I took it with me to the door.”
Light dazzled him, and he blinked, lifted his head from the satin-covered buttons at the neck of her shirt.
Molly’s eyelids were half-closed, her eyes dilated. Her hair caught on rough spots in the white wall behind her and fanned out in a shining, golden brown halo around her face.
They were collapsed on the stairway, lights blazing, and in full view of the squad car that would make its rounds. The waistband of his jeans gaped where the snap lay open and he had one finger hooked under the thin elastic of her panties, her shirt shoved up above her waist and draped in folds over one pale breast.
“This won’t do,” he muttered, his voice thick and harsh with urgency.
“No,” she agreed, pushing at her shirt.
“Don’t.” He stopped her fretful movements with the brush of his tongue over her hard pink nipple. Still gripping the gun, he lifted her in one arm and slid his other under her knees. Her toe caught in the open V of his zipper, grazed his belly, and he flinched, pierced with pleasure.
Straightening against the clenching in his groin, he took the stairs two at a time, carrying her folded against him. “Molly, Molly,” he whispered against the corner of her mouth. He couldn’t get enough of her. He felt as if he were dying of thirst, smelling water when he couldn’t drink it. “Molly.”
Reaching her room, he flicked off the light. He held her a moment, motionless, letting his senses fill with her in the darkness.
When he let her slide down against him, her hair tangled around the gun and he slipped his fingers through the silky strands, letting them fall into his palm as he straightened her hair.
She turned, watching him as he placed the Luger on her dresser.
Their gazes locked in the mirror. Their reflections overlapped. In his dark jeans and shirt, he was a shadow at her back, while she, a shimmer of white and pale pink reflecting back to him, was small and luminescent in the dim room, her head coming to below his chin. She moved, he did. In the mirror, their arms collided, slid together, his over hers until she was drawn back against his darkness and lost in the shadows of his form. He touched the pulse thrumming in the bend of her elbow and brought her arms and hands back against his hips.
She flattened her hands against him, and in the mirror, Harlan saw the pleasure in her face, felt her pleasure as she softened against him. Above her, barely visible, his eyes were dark. Only the gold rims showed.
He lifted the fall of hair at her neck, baring the nape, and bent to the small, delicate spot where her spine joined the base of her skull. With the tip of his tongue, he flicked it once. Her skin smelled of her bath soap, spicy and clean, and she tasted of milk and honey. Then, his mouth firm against her silky skin, he bit gently, a careful claiming. Held in place with his mouth and body, she shivered, a long, rolling tremor against him as she moved her hands convulsively down his thighs and up again.
And all the while, his teeth sharp and careful on her skin, Harlan watched her, as much a prisoner of her pleasure as she.
Keeping her hair to one side, he trailed kisses over the curve of her neck and down to her shoulder, nudging aside the satin fabric to find skin softer than any satin ever made.
“You make me weak with need,” he whispered against her skin. “Strong with hunger. For you, only you.” Releasing one of her arms, he traced the line of buttons, flicking them open as he went until his hand rested at the final one at her stomach. In the mirror he saw his forearm lying over the sharp point of her hip and his wrist against the supple, bare skin of her belly. His index finger was at the rim of her navel. In the opened front of her shirt, her skin from belly to breasts glowed rosy and warm. Her nipples were delicate rose points in the mirror as he slipped his hand lower and cupped her against the nylon of her panties.
She jerked against his hand and her eyes flickered shut, opened, closed as he pressed the heel of his hand against her. He absorbed her response with his watching eyes, with the strength of his chest at her back, with the palm of his hand. He trailed his fingers back up the middle of her torso, all the way to her neck and back down to her left breast. Circling the ruched tip, he watched the hectic flush burn under her quivering skin. Slowly, slowly he edged his finger around that point until she twisted and turned against him, gently scraping the soft skin until she whispered, “Please.”
“Here?” He slipped his hand lower.
“No. Yes,” she said as he slipped his hand inside the elastic edge of her panties and touched her. Startled, she moved violently against him, and as she did, he slid his left hand to her breast and cupped it, flicking his thumb against the hard point.
Holding her there, watching her glow against him and respond to him, Harlan thought he would die with the need to have her and he shook inside until he didn’t know anymore which tremors were his, which hers.
Like clouds passing over water, their reflections shivered in the mirror.
“Molly, I can’t wait,” he groaned. “Not any longer. I want to, for you, but I…” He stroked against her from behind, and touched lower, parting her, tracing her slickness until his eyes shut and nothing existed for him except the pleasure of touching Molly Harris and wanting her and knowing she wanted him. Tension flattened his lips across his teeth.
“You don’t have to wait. I don’t want you to.” Her words were a thready sound in the darkness, the final invitation.
“May I?” he asked and skimmed her panties down with the back of his hand.
“Yes, you may,” she said, her laugh shaky and her movements restless, agitated. She dropped her head to his shoulder and reached up to curve her arm around his neck. She slid her fingers into his hair and his scalp buzzed with her touch.
Harlan bent his knees and lifted her leg to the edge of the dresser. His jeans slithered to the floor. His belt buckle thudded against the wood and foil caught the light, twinkled to the floor as, with an urgent thrust, his knees bent to accommodate her shorter height, he brought her down onto him and held her, controlling their movements while he watched them in the mirror, watched her spine arch her forward, her breasts lifting and falling as he took her, as she took him, watched the play of light and shadows in the mirror and in her silvery eyes until something beyond pleasure rocketed through him and took him into darkness where he was lost, lost, his eyes shut against the wonder, and only her hand shaping his face in the dark splendor could bring him back.
Her. Molly.
When Molly turned to Harlan, he was still shuddering, his broad shoulders under his shirt bunched and tight. She stood on tiptoe and took his hard, angular face in her hands. A dark flush slashed his cheekbones, and his chest was sweat-sheened as she unbuttoned the slate buttons of his shirt. Those buttons had pressed into her spine, their cool hardness a perverse pleasure against her heated skin.
Dropping his shirt on the floor, she walked to the edge of her bed, glancing at him over her shoulder, her eyes filled with mischief. She’d wondered what he would look like without his mask. She’d wondered how emotion would transform his austere, remote expression. And now she knew.
His naked hunger was there for her to read in every line of his harsh
face, his tough body. She was responsible for his loss of control. He’d yielded the force of his body to her, letting her find a sensualism in herself she’d never dreamed she possessed, enabling her to forget everything except the intensity of what he was sharing with her.
When he stepped to her side in a flowing, smooth movement that made her blink, she stroked his face and watched his eyes dilate. Her hold over him turned his gold eyes dark with need.
“You like knowing how you turn me on, don’t you, sweet Molly?” He lifted an eyebrow and grinned at her. “You like having me—” he gestured lazily along the length of his body “—at your command, don’t you?”
She nodded, her heart in her throat as she stared at him. He was all primal male and he allowed her to see how much power her touch, her glance had over him. Even as she stared, he responded as if she had touched him and stroked him intimately.
“See what you do to me? See the power you have, Molly?” He shrugged. “I can’t hide how you make me feel.”
“Good,” she said with feminine satisfaction and wonder. She slid her hand across his slick, smooth chest and watched the ridged muscles of his abdomen tighten. Filled with awe at the miracle of him, she slipped her hand to his hip, down his tight flanks, up the curving line of his spine until she tangled her fingers in the heavy silk of his black hair. He stayed still under her touches, his hands at his sides, but Molly had the oddest sensation that where she touched him, his skin buzzed, vibrated, hummed with an electrical pulse.
He made a noise almost like a low growl in his throat as she ran her fingernails down his spine to the cleft of his buttocks. “Molly,” he said, claiming her with a kiss that curled her toes and left her limp against his hard chest. He swung her up into his arms and onto her bed. “I need you again. Now.”
Flinging her arms out to the side, she whispered, “Be my guest,” offering herself to him and knowing in the deepest part of her self that the power she had over him, he also had over her, knowing that what she gave him was more than her body.
Lover in the Shadows Page 20