Intimate Betrayal

by Linda Barlow

  “Okay. Get down,” he said in a voice that was clearly accustomed to being obeyed.

  “The dogs…?”

  “I have them under restraint.”

  He was at the base of the tree now, peering up at her. “Jump down,” he ordered.

  Annie stumbled as she landed and ended up sprawled at his feet. He was wearing running shoes, she noted. Black running shoes.

  His legs were clad in jeans. A billionaire in jeans. Absurd, she thought, the things you notice when you’re scared to death.

  Looking up at him, blinking against the light, she felt her terror shift tohumiliation. What must she look like—scruffy and wild, her clothing orn, her hair wild, her body still trembling with exertion and adrenaline and fear

  He made a sound. Recognition. Real or fake, false or true? Even if he had been the driver of the dark sedan, he would be surprised to find her here. He wouldn’t have expected that.

  The worst of the bright light moved, sliding on down her body, and she could see him once again as she lay there looking up, a tall, dominant figure silhouetted against the night sky. He held the two dogs on short chain leashes. They were panting, drooling, still looking as if they’d like to rip her to shreds.

  “Annie?”

  He sounded truly surprised. And no wonder. If he had tried to run her down, he must have been cursing himself for missing her, and now here she was delivering herself directly into his hands.

  She saw that he was holding an automatic pistol. Dear God! Her fear took a giant leap. With the gun in his hand, he looked more like a desperado than a wealthy, sophisticated businessman.

  As they stared at each other, gazes locked over the gun he held, the skies opened and the rain came pouring down, its swift and sudden violence plastering Annie’s hair against her skull. She closed her arms around her body, shivering, even as she expected at any second to feel the violent impact that would end her life.

  “Christ!” The word exploded out of him. “What kind of stupidity is this? I took you for a burglar. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

  He reached down and hauled her to her feet. She stumbled, feeling as if her legs wouldn’t hold her weight. The surges of adrenaline that had sustained her so long seemed now to have been exhausted. She felt as if she was crashing, unable to fight any longer, unable to do anything more in her own defense.

  Matt ran the flashlight over her again. “Shit,” he said softly. “You’re hurt.”

  Annie looked down and saw the blood on her knee. It must have happened when she fell against the tree. “It’s just a scrape,” she whispered.

  He released the dogs, who were docile now that their master obviously knew the intruder. Matt shoved the gun into the pocket of his jeans and took Annie’s hand. “Come with me.”

  He pulled her along behind him as he started back up the stairs. She made atoken attempt to free herself, but he was too strong. When she stumbled again, he stopped, turned, and shifted his grip on her, then picked her up in his arms. He carried her the remaining few steps to the back garden of his mammoth house.

  With rain pouring down on them and thunder growling in the distance and an occasional flash of lightning piercing the fog, Annie felt as though she were entering an unreal world. Her brain felt sluggish, but all her senses were alive. She could hear each individual raindrop as it struck the earth and the stones underfoot. The rustle of leaves, the sighs of the flowers as their stems bent in the wind. The combined smells of herbs and grasses, Matt’s faintly musky, masculine scent, a lemony whiff of her own perfume.

  He was holding her, carrying her, straining a bit—she could hear it in his breathing; but he was strong and fit enough to do this—stronger than she was—male, ruthless, indomitable. He had just tried to kill her. Now he was taking her inside his huge house, where the rooms were gloomy and the walls were thick and he would be able to do anything he wanted to her. She wouldn’t be able to stop him any more than she could stop the storm.

  She closed her eyes, letting her head rest against the hard flesh and bone of his shoulder. She could feel the steady, if slightly rapid, beating of his heart. It reminded her of another day, another time. London. The rain. His arms around her, his hands sliding under her clothing to find her hot, slippery skin. Yearning. Pleasure. Need.

  I must be totally out of it, Annie thought vaguely, because for some reason, she wasn’t afraid.

  Matt Carlyle had no idea why Annie Jefferson had been darting about his property, dashing precipitously down his garden steps. It was one more mystery among too many. But he didn’t know, and didn’t care.

  The point was, she was here.

  He had her.

  Her body was wet and slick, and by some miracle she felt as light as feathers as he carried her. He knew that tomorrow, surely, he would ache all over from this madness. But that didn’t matter. Where Annie was concerned, he’d been aching all over for years.

  No more. The chase had gone on long enough. This would be the night that ended it. He was going to settle things between them once and for all.

  He reached the house and shouldered his way in through the half-open door. The dogs followed, still excited, still uncertain about this stranger and what was going on. He kicked the door shut, snapped on the lock. The woman in his arms shivered at the sound, and he knew she was as confused as he was.

  That didn’t matter, either. The confusion would soon end. There was one way to end it, and he should have done it long ago.

  He carried her through the dark kitchen, through the pantry and the dining room, out into the hallway and up the grand staircase to the second floor. He was breathing hard now; his heart was straining. His arms and back felt numb with stress. She was far smaller than he, but she wasn’t that small. He figured that she weighed about 120 pounds.

  He carried her directly to his bedroom, elbowed the door shut behind them, crossed the huge room, and laid her down gently in the middle of his unmade, king-size bed.

  She lay still for an instant, her eyes shut, apparently trying to absorb what had happened and where she was. Her entire body was tense and stiff, but beautiful. The rain had pasted her clothes to her. He could see the rise of her breasts, the flat of her belly, the beguiling curve of her hips. Her legs were long and well shaped. Her wrists were delicate. Her blond hair, drenched, looked darker than usual, and strands of it clung to her cheeks and neck and shoulders. She looked helpless and vulnerable, and he wanted to comfort and soothe her. But not as much as he wanted to take her, conquer her, make her his own.

  He knelt beside her on the bed and put his face close to hers. She turned away, but he gripped her chin and turned it back to him.

  With his lips brushing hers he told her, “Annie, I’m going to take off your wet things. Then mine. Then I’m going to make love to you. Right here, right now, while the storm rages outside.”

  She opened her eyes. The expression in them was half dazed, half wild, like that of a forest animal trapped in a hunter’s beam.

  But he held her gaze, and slowly her expression calmed. Her limbs unstiffened and her body relaxed.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  “Because I can’t stand it anymore.”

  She nodded. The look in her eyes now was dreamy and mysterious—eternal womanhood, the creature he could never in a million years understand. He hadn’t understood Francesea, and at the moment, Annie seemed even more subtle a mystery.

  “Okay,” she said.

  That was it. Okay. Consent. It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but okay was good enough.

  Annie was beyond surprises now and far beyond fear. It wasn’t his car, she was thinking. It was dark. All those cars look alike. It couldn’t have been his car.

  Another part of her was thinking, I don’t even care if it was his car. It doesn’t matter what almost happened, because this is more powerful than that.

  He was stripping off her clothes, a little roughly, but efficiently. Her leaden hands tried to help him but he p
ushed them away. His were faster, and quickness mattered, quickness mattered.

  A button on her blouse popped and flew across the room, and then it was open, pushed away to the sides, and his hands were on her breasts. She sighed as he caressed her, squeezed her, brushed his fingers over the tips of her nipples. Fire arced between her breasts and sped down to the pit of her belly. He bent his head. His mouth took the nub of one breast and his tongue darted over it and then he sucked. Annie arched her back and moaned. She felt the slickness between her legs as her body responded to his.

  He felt so familiar. The years washed away. Her body remembered him. Remembered and accepted him in a manner that her rational mind never could.

  But her rational mind had shut down. She couldn’t hear its warnings. There are things known in the heart, known in the bone, that the mind has no conception of.

  His hands left her for a few moments and she heard him pulling off his shirt, shoes, jeans. While he frantically worked, she unzipped her skirt and pushed it down over her hips. Her panties, too. His hands came back and tore them away.

  He fumbled for something in the drawer beside his bed, and she realized that his mind was operating better than hers, for despite this onslaught of passion he was protecting her with a condom. Would a man who had just tried to kill her care about using a condom?

  It wasn ’t his car, couldn ’t have been his car.

  When he came to her she closed her eyes and simply felt the sensations—skin against skin, muscle against muscle, flesh against flesh. His arms enveloped her and he rolled them both on their sides. His legs meshed with hers, his knee against her mound, one hand caressing her back, the other her breasts.

  Her hands, in turn, explored his strong arms and shoulders, delighting in the springy feel of sinew smoothed over bone. He squeezed her nipple hard enough to elicit a gasp, and she could feel his smile against her mouth as he kissed her deeply, the smile fading as his tongue penetrated and teased and probed.

  “Annie,” he murmured as his fingers slipped between her thighs to touch the soft slick petals, so damp, so sensitive. She moaned and pressed herself against his hand. As he strummed her there she quivered and cried out with the sweet simple pleasure of it, and the yearning, and the need.

  His tongue deep in her mouth, he flipped her onto her back and with his knees pushed her thighs apart. She opened to him gladly, eagerly. He continued to caress her wickedly between her thighs, and Annie moved against him, frantic now, desperate. She was climbing toward the peak when he stopped. She moaned in protest, and he reared up over her and thrust inside her, penetrating her fully with one masterful lunge.

  Together, frantic, on fire, they rode out the storm.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  No sooner was it over than Annie pushed him away and rolled to the far side of the bed. She sat up, pulling the sheet around her like a toga. She could feel herself trembling.

  “Annie,” he said, moving toward her.

  “Don’t touch me!” She leaped from the bed, dragging the sheet with her. Keeping her eyes on him, she backed away until she came up against the wall.

  His face darkened. “You don’t know how it makes me feel to look into my lover’s eyes and see that deep inside her, there’s a shadow of doubt whether I’m a killer.”

  The bitterness in his tone stabbed her in the gut, but she ordered herself to be strong. Even though all it took from him was a single look, a random touch, to reduce her body to liquid, she had to resist. She had to clear this up. She had to. Oh, please God, she had to!

  “It’s more than a shadow,” she whispered. “Someone tried to kill me. He lured me to this neighborhood, then tried to run me down with a car. I eluded him—or so I thought. Then I came to you for help. But when you pulled into your driveway, your car looked identical to the one that had tried to hit me. So I fled.”

  His green eyes were burning. “I see. Once a murderer, always a murderer?”

  She pulled the sheet more firmly around her. “What about Giuseppe?”

  Matt sat up in bed, leaning back against the headboard, unabashedly naked. “What do you mean, ’What about Giuseppe’? I didn’t even know the man.”

  “Francesca did. In fact, she was the one who originally recommended Giuseppe and his fellow craftsmen to me.”

  He shrugged. “Francesca knew a lot of people. Very few of them were folks whom I bothered to get to know.”

  “Giuseppe and your wife were great friends. He was a sweet man who loved to play paternal admirer to any beautiful woman. He used to treat my friend Darcy with the same affectionate indulgence that I remember seeing him express with Francesca.”

  Matt stared at her as if to say, So

  “He left the country on the same day she died. He was abroad during most of your trial, then he came back, and now he’s dead. In fact, you might just have been one of the last people to see him alive.”

  The hostility level in his eyes intensified. “What the hell are you implying?”

  “You say you didn’t know him. But you surely haven’t forgotten that I introduced you to him that afternoon when you came for your first tour of the cathedral. He died that same night.”

  He stood up suddenly, startling her. He strode around his bed and came up close to her—too close. She remembered these intimidating tactics from long ago—the first business meeting she’d had with him, when Fabrications still existed… before he had refused to hire her. As always when she remembered, she felt her spine stiffen. She stood her ground. This man would not intimidate her again.

  “Are you suggesting that I killed him?” he asked in a quiet yet dangerous tone.

  “I was just wondering if the police had drawn any conclusions—erroneous ones, of course. I know you have no respect for the police in this city. They hounded you before, you say, and I wondered if they were hounding you again.”

  “Hounded me? Is that what you’d call it? They did an incompetent and lazy investigation of a brutal murder, pinned it on me, and tried me for my life—and all it sounds like to you is hounding?”

  “If you think about what hounding originally meant, it’s pretty accurate, I guess.”

  He touched her arm, and she found that she could not pull away, either from him or from the powerful gleam in his eyes. “And now? Who’s hounding whom now?” he asked her.

  She swallowed. “Look, I just—”

  “You’re getting scared, aren’t you? I’m getting too close to you and you’re shying away.”

  “That’s not it!”

  “What,then? Five minutes ago you were howling out your passion in my arms. Now, suddenly, you’re throwing my wife’s murder in my face.”

  “Actually, I was throwing Giuseppe’s murder in your face,” she said softly.

  His hands were on her shoulders now. “And what I don’t understand, dammit, is why?”

  Annie remembered Darcy’s theory. “Well, what if Giuseppe knew something that could incriminate Francesca’s killer? He may even have been your wife’s lover.”

  Matt stared at her. Then he threw back his head and laughed.

  “It’s not funny.”

  “Dear Christ, it’s hilarious!”

  She stared at him, fidgeting with the sheet, while he howled with laughter. It wasn’t good laughter, however. It retained that bitter edge.

  “Francesca was a snob and a social climber. She would no more lie down with a construction worker than she would with a woman.”

  “Giuseppe wasn’t a simple construction worker. He was a master craftsman, an artist.”

  “Trust me, Annie, if he made less than a quarter of a million a year or dressed in anything other than Armani, she wouldn’t even have looked at the guy.”

  “He was handsome, too. An older version of Vico—and trust me, Vico is a hunk.”

  “Vico is also your killer, Annie, not me.”

  “I just can’t believe that. I think Vico saw the killer, but I don’t think he is the killer!”

  Mat
t shook his head. “You don’t know what you think, Annie.”

  His voice was weary now, and something in it got through to her. She sank down on the foot of the bed and bent over, putting in head in her hands.

  What’s the matter with me? she asked herself. I just made love to this man. Why can’t I trust him?

  What are you afraid of?

  Maybe he was right. Maybe she was afraid.

  “Look,” he said. “This conversation is going nowhere. I’m going to go downstairs and make us some coffee.” He nodded toward her clothes, which were flung all over the floor. “Why don’t you get dressed. Take a shower first if you want to. Maybe you’ll feel better if you wash yourself clean of me. What just happened between us was obviously a mistake.”

  She moaned as though he had struck her. She felt him hesitate as he moved past her, headed for the bedroom door. She lifted her head and met his eyes… and saw his pain.

  “Wait,” she whispered. “Matthew. Matt.” She reached out her hand to him. “Wait a minute. Don’t go.”

  She thought for an instant that he was going to turn his back on her, and she realized that she wouldn’t blame him if he did. But the moment passed. He sighed, came closer, and took her hand. She squeezed his fingers, and the current arced between them again. Shaking his head, he sat down beside her on the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m stressed out, I’m nervous, I’m feeling at the end of my rope. And someone tried to kill me tonight. Then suddenly you were making love to me, and it was so amazing, so good” She slid closer, turned her face to his shoulder. “Help me, Matt. My head is swimming and I don’t know what to believe about anyone or anything.”

  His arms came around her, hard. She felt his lips against the side of her head. “Annie, I swear to you on my life, it wasn’t me who tried to run you down. I didn’t kill Francesca and I certainly didn’t kill Giuseppe. As for you… I’m crazy about you. I’d never hurt you, never, Annie. I need you to believe that. If you can’t believe it, we’re dead in the water.We’ll never get off the ground.”