“That’s one,” she breathed, clinging to his shoulders.
“One what?”
“Weak spot.”
“Mmm.” He tended to the needs of the other. “And is this … too?”
She arched into him. “Oh! Yes!”
“Shell?”
“Hmm?” She opened her eyes and realized she was lying on her back on an enormous bed and had no clear memory of having got there. Jase knelt over her, his hands on either side of her, his knees bracketing her hips.
His eyes were black with emotion. “I never meant to fall in love with you.”
Slowly, concentrating hard, she undid the black onyx studs on the front of his shirt. “Did you?” She parted the shirt and slid her hands over the thick, dark hair that curled over his chest. “Fall in love with me?”
He smiled and brushed the lightest of kisses over her lips. “Oh, yes. Very much so.” He flopped down to lie beside her, one arm over his eyes.
“After Sterling accused me and I admitted it, and you looked at me as if I were the lowest scum on earth, I wanted to sit down and bawl like a little kid, because you hated me. In that moment I knew I loved you. You don’t know how close I came to blowing my entire case before I even have one.”
She pulled his arm down and leaned over him, trailing one finger through the thick hair on his chest. She fiddled with a nipple and kissed it, then sat back to admire the result. The bruises that had been so livid only four days earlier were now pale yellow around the edges and several shades of hideous green in the center.
“Do you have a case?” she asked, and her voice wobbled.
Jase hurt for her. “The message read, ‘We have a match.’ I’ll be getting enlargements tomorrow.”
Her shoulders heaved once as she sat up and dropped her head to his chest. “Poor Grandma.” He enfolded her with love, rocked her with compassion and tenderness. “I know, my darling. I know how bad it makes you feel.”
She leaned back, her eyes glistening with unshed tears, and traced the shape of his lips with her finger. His grandmother hadn’t had a hero to prevent the villain from tying her to the railroad tracks. And Jase still suffered because of that. “Yes,” she said. “You do know, don’t you?”
He nodded. “That’s why I have to stop him.”
She swallowed. “Jase … make love with me. Please.”
“So you can forget?”
She smiled weakly. “No. Because I ache with wanting you, and I’m not sure how to get things going. None of what I’ve done so far seems to have worked.”
He laughed and shoved her hand down to the front of his trousers. “It’s worked, darlin’. Believe me, it’s worked. But I always seem to be rushing you. I didn’t want to scare you again.”
“I’m not scared. Or, if I am, it’s only because I’m not very experienced, and maybe I won’t … please you.”
A flare of alarm lit his eyes. “You’re not a virgin!”
“No. But …” —she smiled wryly—“not far from it. And you’ve explored … the world.” She wet her suddenly dry lips. “Sharba was somewhere in that world and you still dream about her.”
He shook his head slowly. “Sometimes I have nightmares. About Iraq. I was in an undercover military unit there, before I got out and joined the FBI. It was … compromised. So Sharba may figure in some of them. She … seduced me and then betrayed me. Only, instead of me getting killed, it was my buddy Carson who paid the price for my stupidity.”
She nodded. “Carson. Yes. You cried out his name, too, that first night. In my house.”
His warmth engulfed her as he held her close, and she nearly sobbed aloud at the incredible sensation of his bare skin against hers, his chest hair abrading her nipples, his heat invading her breasts. “Sharba was a long time ago,” he said. “I thought I loved her. Maybe I did. I promised to get her out of there, but she was a spy. I stopped loving her. Now, I love you.”
Shell lifted her head. “End of story?”
He smiled. “No. Beginning of story.” She kissed him until he groaned and pulled away. “May I make love to you now?”
“Haven’t you been?”
“Not the way I want to.” He sat up, tilted her back, and lifted her hips to pull her jeans and bikini panties off. His mouth followed the garments all the way to her feet, where he paused and kissed her toes before working his way back up. He kissed her breasts, molded them, took gentle and not-so-gentle bites of her neck, and wrapped his hand tenderly around her throat in that unique and madly arousing way he had while he took her mouth, making it his own territory to plunder as he chose.
Shell ached deep inside, filled with a terrible yearning. She shifted her legs against his, twisted them around his, then struggled to undo his pants and slide them off him. Rolling to a half sitting position, she forced his pants down over his knees and feet, then kissed her way back up, as he had done. She lingered at his injury on his thigh, where only a small bandage remained, then traced up the inside of his thigh to the edge of his bulging underwear. She laid her cheek on that and released a shuddering breath.
He caught her, pulling her high against his chest, then wrapped her tightly in his arms and legs and rolled her under him. He pinned her legs with his, and his breath rasped against her neck as he spread her hair out over the pillow. “Woman … you’re going to be deadly when you have what you think is enough experience.”
“I want to start getting it. Now, Jase! Now!” Her undulating hips seemed to urge him on, and she didn’t try to quell them. Her low moans broke like waves over her ears as she lost herself in the sensations his caresses created. She pleaded with him, raked his back with her nails, arched to his mouth and probing fingers. When she thought she could take no more, she took more, until he thrust back from her, readied himself, then knelt over her again, between her legs. He stroked her slick moistness with soft, delicate touches, watching her face as she stared at him.
“Jase … please,” she begged again, writhing beneath him. He gave in, sinking down over her, entering her with exquisite slowness at first. She surged up, though, and he drove hard, again and again, taking her completely, forcefully, and her world shattered around her.
“Sweetheart?” Long moments later he nuzzled her neck and shook his head, his hair tickling her chin.
“Hmm?”
“I’m sorry. I meant for that to be slow and sweet and to last forever. I rushed you again, didn’t I?”
She laughed softly as she played with his earlobe. “I didn’t mind. Maybe next time will be slow and sweet and will last forever.”
Next time? At her words Jase felt himself grow and harden inside her. It had been good enough for her that she was already anticipating a next time? He kissed her very, very quickly, restraining himself with all the strength he had left.
“It will be,” he said. “I promise you that, my love. But now I have to leave you for a minute.” She let her arms fall limply to the bed as he eased out of her carefully. “We don’t want any spills or other accidents,” he said, turning his back for a moment.
“I’d like to have your baby.” Her words surprised even her, and her eyes were wide as he stared at her over his shoulder. “I mean … well, sort of as a hypothetical exercise in … in … speculation. If I was ever going to have a baby, I wouldn’t mind if it was yours.”
He lay beside her again and drew her close, pulling the covers over them. “Honey, babies aren’t hypothetical. I’d never have one … on spec. I don’t suppose I’ll ever become a father. My life doesn’t lend itself to that kind of self-indulgence.”
She traced the line of one scar as it crossed his back from shoulder blade to armpit. “That’s right,” he said, as if she had asked. “I hate the idea of a widow and fatherless children weeping over my grave.”
There was nothing she could say. Nothing she could do. Except kiss him.
“Don’t I remember something about a promise?” she asked a few later as she listened to the heavy hammering of his he
art, felt the hard, insistent prodding of his erection against her thigh. “Something about slow and sweet and lasting for … for a long time?”
Jase didn’t correct her memory of the word he’d so carelessly used. Nothing lasted forever. Nothing.
But this time their lovemaking lasted for a long, long time.
There was something deliciously decadent, Shell thought the next morning, about stepping into a hotel elevator with a man after a night of making love, and going downstairs for breakfast. It made her feel even more wantonly wicked than the room-service breakfast in bed he had suggested would have. Were people looking at them, she wondered, taking their linked hands as proof that they were lovers? She liked having the world see her as Jase’s lover.
And there was something decidedly embarrassing, she thought two hours later, about walking into her grandmother’s apartment with that same man; they were no longer hand in hand, but Shell suspected that her grandmother would know without being told that she and Jase were lovers. Would she approve?
Especially after she heard what Jase had to tell her.
Evelyn Landry, a small, aristocratic-looking woman whose smooth, soft skin and erect bearing belied her age, met them at the door.
“Good morning, dear,” she said after a moment of clear astonishment at seeing Jase with Shell. She kissed her granddaughter on the cheek, gave Jase a cool nod, then addressed Shell as if Jase did not exist.
“I thought you’d be alone,” she said, a faint admonition in her tone. “You asked me to be alone when you called this morning.”
Shell clenched her fists inside her jacket pockets. “Yes, Grandma. I know. But …” She slid an uneasy look at her companion. “Jase is the one who has something to tell you, something you must know.”
“Oh?” Evelyn smiled bleakly and flicked another dismissing glance at Jase. “And what might that be? Exactly how he intends to write about my son and attempt to destroy his career? Does he want to try to justify his deeds, or does he hope I’ll give him some dirt out of my son’s distant past?” She waved Shell to silence when she tried to answer what had been a purely rhetorical question.
“Sterling told me, you see,” Evelyn went on, “what happened last night in your father’s office. He is most disturbed at having been the one to hurt you by exposing this man for what he really is, but now that you know, I fail to understand why he is in your company. And in my home.”
She spared Jase one more glance of outright condemnation, then continued. “I must say, Shirley Elizabeth, when you called and asked to see me alone, I believed you were heartbroken at having been taken in by a false charmer and were seeking solace from me. Never did I expect you to arrive with the enemy himself at your side. I trust you can explain yourself adequately?”
“Grandma, please. Jase isn’t the false charmer.”
Evelyn’s fine, fair brows rose toward her lightly tinted hair. “Oh? Your intonation suggests that there is a false charmer in our midst. Who might that be?”
“Sterling, Grandma.” Shell took her grandmother’s hand and led her into the living room. “Please, sit down and listen to us. You have to hear this, as much as I hate to be the one to tell you. Sterling is a con-artist. He will hurt you if we let him. In fact, he’s not Sterling Graves at all. Jase hasn’t learned yet what name he was born with, but he can prove to you that he isn’t Sterling Graves. It’s Sterling Jase is after, not Dad—that was just a blind.”
Evelyn sat erect on her rose brocade love seat. Only a faint tremor in her loosely linked hands betrayed that she was not as serene as she seemed to be. Shell sat beside her, covering Evelyn’s hands with one of her own. “Please, Grandma? Will you listen? It’s for your own—”
Evelyn sighed. “For my own good, dear? When you’ve lived as long as I, you learn that things given us for our own ‘good’ normally taste vile.”
“No, ma’am,” Jase said, speaking for the first time. “Not for your own good. For your own safety is the way I’d put it. And the safety of others. May I sit down?”
Evelyn assented with a regal inclination of her head.
Jase took the matching chair opposite the love seat and set his laptop computer on the coffee table. He opened its lid and switched it on. It hummed to life. Luckily, only the battery connection had suffered from getting damp, and after it had dried out, it worked perfectly. He wished he could say the same for his briefcase. Being in the front seat, it had been completely immersed, and most of the paper inside had been reduced to a sodden mass of illegible ink on useless paper.
One item that had survived, however, was his grandmother’s photo of Martin Francis. While his computer went through its initial warm-up phases, he pulled the snapshot from its new plastic case and handed it to Evelyn. “This man lived in Miami two years ago. Before that, he was in Boston and likely many other places as well. His name, as you can see written on the back, was not Sterling Graves when he was in Boston. I didn’t actually get a name for him from his time in Miami.”
Evelyn looked, turned the photo over, and stared at the picture again. “This man has no mustache.” She lifted her eyes to Jase’s. “But I must say he does bear a striking resemblance to Sterling.”
Jase nodded and withdrew two folded sheets of paper from his pocket. They had arrived at his hotel early that morning. He passed her one. “This is an enlarged photograph of the prints from the right index finger and the right thumb of the man in that photograph.” He handed her the other sheet. “And these are the prints I lifted last night off a glass Sterling Graves had handled. I took digital photographs of them and sent the results to a … friend in California. He made the comparisons and declared a match. He’s an expert, but I believe the similarities are enough for even the untrained eye to see. With this degree of magnification.”
He showed several points of similarity, and Evelyn sighed almost inaudibly as she set the papers on the coffee table.
“I went to school with Sterling’s sister,” she said, but her voice lacked strength. “I knew him, although he was somewhat younger. He—” She frowned and waved her hand over the photo, not looking at it. “That man knows many details of my girlhood.”
Jase nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I know he does. He’s very thorough.” He turned the computer to face her, then knelt on the floor so he could show her different pieces of information as they came up on the screen at his command.
“Sterling Graves, the real one, passed away more than thirty years ago. This is an outline of his life, taken from documents I was able to obtain. He never married, fathered no children.”
Jase clicked his wireless mouse and the screen was filled with a new file. “His sister, the one who was your high school and college friend, also died young—of cancer when she was in her early forties.” That information was given in greater detail. Evelyn stared at it for several moments, then looked up.
“I see,” she said. “Then he knew he was quite safe in using that name.” She sighed again. “Why did he lie to me? What is his purpose?”
“He’s a con-man, Grandma,” Shell said. “He wants your money.”
“Yes. What else would a man want from someone of my age?”
“Grandma, you’re a—”
Evelyn patted Shell’s hand. “Hush, dear. Forgive me my moment of self-pity. It was foolish of me.”
She straightened her spine and addressed Jase. “What do you want from me? You said the man could harm me. And others.”
“I want help from you, Mrs. Landry, if you can bring yourself to do it. I suspect that Sterling—we’ll continue to call him that, if you have no objections—will be asking you to withdraw securities and hand them over to him, temporarily, of course, so that he can gain enough evidence to convict an officer of the bank that employs him. That seems to be one of the stories he uses most often. Or perhaps he’ll want you to invest in some sure-fire resort property he plans to buy to expand his own empire. What has he claimed to be?”
“A hotelier with many properties in
Europe. He intends to enter the North and South American markets and—” She gave her head a quick shake. Her hands trembled in her lap as she twisted a dainty lawn hankie in her fingers. Shell rose swiftly and went to a sideboard where she poured her grandmother a small glass of sherry. Evelyn downed it then held out the glass. “Another, if you don’t mind, dear. Shall I ring for coffee for you and Mr. … er, I’m sorry.” She pressed the fingers and thumb of her left hand to her temples for a second.
“O’Keefe,” Jase said, and caught Shell’s glance as she returned with another sherry. She nodded. “And yes, please, I’m sure Shell and I could both do with coffee.”
After the maid had served coffee in thin, almost transparent bone china cups, and passed around warm, buttered scones with raspberry jam on the side, Evelyn said “So I’m not the first.” She seemed to take some comfort in that.
“No, ma’am. What I’d like to see is that you’re the last. I’m hoping you’ll go along with him when he asks you to help him, or asks you for money on any pretext, and will let me know so we can catch him in the act.”
Evelyn sat even straighter. “He’s already asked. Naturally, I said that I would speak to my son first. He asked me not to do that. He made it sound very … plausible, the need for secrecy.”
“Oh, Grandma,” Shell whispered, sliding her arm around her grandmother’s rigid back. “I’m so sorry. But don’t worry. Jase can … I’m sure the authorities can get back what you’ve lost.” She gazed appealingly at Jase. “You see, he works for the FBI and they need proof before they can go after—”
“Shirley Elizabeth Landry!” Evelyn shook off her arm and rounded on her. “What do you think I am, a stupid old woman? I merely said that Sterling asked me for financial assistance while he waited for his funds to arrive from Europe, not that I had given it to him. For goodness’ sake! Your grandfather taught me much better than that.”
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