Bear Claw Conspiracy

by Jessica Andersen

  He didn’t say anything at first, which made her think the moment had come and gone.

  But then, without looking at her, he said, “The summer before my senior year in college, my father’s chopper went down during a National Guard training exercise. When my mother heard that he was being rushed to a trauma center about an hour away, she and my fifteen-year-old sister Lena jumped in the car and took off.” His voice was almost inflectionless, as though time or repetition had robbed the story of its emotion. “They ran a red light a couple of miles from home and got T-boned by a furniture truck. They both died instantly.”

  Oh, she thought. Oh, no. A soft sound escaped her. She had heard the stories the cops told at Shakey’s after shift—about families devastated by multiple blows at once, wretched coincidences where even the survivors were victims. But she couldn’t imagine—didn’t want to imagine—the pain.

  He continued: “Ian and I were in France, spending a month before school started back up. It took the authorities two days to track us down, took me another day and a half to get home. They had been dead four days before I made it back.”

  Gigi nearly closed her eyes to block out his pain. But then, knowing that was the coward’s way out, she instead reached out to him. He didn’t offer a hand, didn’t offer anything, just stayed braced back on his palms, staring into the bubbling water. She wrapped her fingers around his wrist and squeezed, feeling his pulse beneath her fingers. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Not for you.”

  “Yeah.” He unbent a little, shifted and took her hand. He twined his fingers through hers so gently that tears prickled behind her eyes, though she didn’t let him see.

  “Afterward, the whole political science thing seemed…pointless, like it was just people sitting around and arguing about stuff most of them would never need to worry about. I wanted to make an immediate difference in peoples’ lives, make things safer for them, better.”

  “So you became a cop.”

  He paused, mouth twisting in a humorless smile. “I lost my father because of a freak mechanical problem, my mother and sister because of distracted driving and bad timing, not any sort of crime. But yeah. I became a cop. Within a few years I was the guy they called on for the tricky stuff, the one who always went in the door first. I was promoted to SWAT, then to team leader. For nearly three years, Team Four cleared more tricky situations without casualties than any other team…and then the odds caught up with us.”

  He let go of her hand and scrubbed at his face, then dropped his arm and just sat there, wrists dangling between his knees. “It was a hostage call, which always adds to the pucker factor because you’ve got civilians in there, and it was at a bank, which sucks for the obvious reasons. The robbers weren’t pros, which meant they were twitchy on the triggers, and…” He shook his head. “My team wasn’t in great shape—one guy’s wife had just walked out on him, another guy had just found out he had a second kid on the way. They said they were good to go, that they could put that stuff aside… Hell, I don’t know. I know prescience isn’t part of the job description, but afterward, looking back, I could see the signs.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, because it was the truth. What else was there to say?

  She had guessed it had been a crisis response gone wrong, but she ached doubly for him now.

  “We were in position, waiting on the hostage negotiator and a few feds who were en route, when the shooting started. Later, we found out that a construction worker had gotten it in his head to play hero and went after one of the thieves. All I knew was that we couldn’t wait. We breached and went in on the intel we had at hand, which was good but not great. We thought there were four gunmen. Turns out there were five, and the fifth guy knew where to aim, how to go in over and under the body armor, and through the joints.”

  Thus the scars high and low on his torso. Gigi’s stomach did a slow roll. “How many casualties?”

  His eyes had gone dead and his voice was flat with pain. “They took out twelve hostages before we breached. Three more were wounded in the crossfire, their bullets, not ours. We got all five of them within, what? Two minutes? Three? But I lost four good officers, including the two guys who had other things on their minds.”

  “Other things,” she echoed. “Like people they cared about.”

  He didn’t seem to hear her. Or maybe he did and didn’t know what to say. He continued: “I took a couple of bullets, lost a chunk of my liver and gained an ulcer. And after I finished rehab, I…I don’t know. Tuned out, I guess, or maybe burned out. I passed the psych evaluation, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t go into a call knowing I was putting my teammates’ lives on the line, and that us going in there—wherever ‘there’ was—could upset the balance and start the shooting again. I lasted three months with SWAT, another three in plainclothes before I quit, moved out here, found some peace and quiet, and thought I had healed just fine.” He glanced at her, expression as fierce and unreadable as it had been the first time they met. “And then you showed up, and the pins and needles started.”

  She took his arm in both of hers, leaned against him and pressed her cheek to his T-shirt-clad shoulder, over the bullet scar. “No matter what happens next, I’m glad we got to know each other.”

  In such a short amount of time, he had become more important to her than she wanted to admit. He annoyed her, intrigued her, turned her on, made her look at things differently. He hadn’t quit because he wasn’t good enough; he had flamed out because he’d cared too much, put too much of himself into the job. She was happy that he was starting to reconnect with the people and things that had once been important to him.

  And when she left… No. She didn’t want to think about that right now. Tonight was tonight.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said quietly. “What, exactly, does happen next?” He paused. “Just now, Jim was talking about sitting with Tanya and regretting the things he hadn’t done because the timing didn’t feel right. And I can’t help thinking that either of us could’ve wound up in the same position today.”

  She shifted to face him as her heart thudded quickly. Although that small, cautious kernel of self-preservation inside her said to keep her distance, the larger part of her wanted to lean in.

  Maybe it was the soft light and the bubbling backdrop, or maybe it was having spent some serious time thinking about death and dying, but the whole idea of avoiding the big foam finger of emotion didn’t seem nearly as critical as it had a few days earlier.

  Still she didn’t want to let him know how huge those emotions were, how all-consuming. He was having enough trouble managing his own head, he shouldn’t have to deal with hers, as well.

  So she let him see she was serious, didn’t let him see her yearn. “I’ve always said I’d rather have regrets about the things I did do, rather than the things I didn’t.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” For a second, the supercop was back in his expression, as if he wanted to warn her to be careful, stay back, duck and cover.

  His sudden fierceness didn’t irritate her as it would have before, because now she knew where he was coming from. More, seeing him in full-on cop mode set off a chain reaction of heat inside her, because for all that she wanted to be the best at what she did, it got her seriously hot when she met someone who was better.

  Mixed in with the heat was tenderness, though, because beneath that capability was the weight of responsibility.

  “Hey,” she said softly, cupping his face in her hands and feeling the bristle of afternoon growth. “We’re safe, remember? You can let yourself be off duty for a few hours.”

  He lifted his hands and caught her wrists, handcuffing her in place. “That’s the problem. I can’t compartmentalize anymore—hell, I wasn’t ever very good at it. I just sucked up the stuff that bothered me. Now, though, I can’t separate this case from the thing that’s bothering me the most.”

  “And what
is that?” she asked, even though she already knew. It was in the intensity of his eyes and the hard, unyielding grip that said he wasn’t going to let her go this time, wasn’t going to push her away.

  “You,” he rasped. The word both thrilled and intimidated her, making the moment feel far more important than it should, far more than she was comfortable with. She had thought she was out of her comfort zone before, but she hadn’t known the half of it.

  She was outside the box, outside her usual paradigm, and she didn’t care.

  The firelight and candles painted him bronze and the humidity had made his hair curl at the tips, contrasting with the hard angles and intensity of his face. His damp T-shirt clung to the bulges of his shoulders and biceps, the ripples of his abs, and his pants were worn enough to drape suggestively, drawing her eyes to the flat planes of his hips and the strong columns of his thighs.

  But it was that small nick of a scar below his knee that caught her attention. It was nothing compared to his bullet scars, but it was part of the history he had drifted away from. It gave him a past, marked a time in his life when he still had his parents and sister, still had dreams of going into politics. Those things were gone, but the guy who’d given him the injury wasn’t. Anyone who had kept an Ian in his life all this time wasn’t nearly the loner he wanted to think.

  And, loner or not, cop or ranger, she wanted him. Now. Tonight.

  As if her body had been waiting for that permission, heat flooded her, pooling in her breasts and core, and making her very aware that she was naked beneath the robe, that only a thin tie separated them.

  His voice rasped low as he said, “I watch you, worry about you, think about you when I should be concentrating on other things.” He paused, expression shifting. “Look, I know you’ve got other plans, and that you don’t want to start something with someone as screwed up as me…so here’s your chance. Say the word and I’ll hole up in the bedroom until morning.”

  “And my other option?” Her heart tapped a quick rhythm in her chest. Tonight is tonight, she thought. She could do this. She could enjoy him yet protect a piece of herself.

  “You’re the overachiever. You figure it out.”

  Lips curving, she shifted her hands in his grip and moved in, conscious of the way her robe gaped at the chest as she rose up onto her knees to lean over him. Catching one of his hands, she brought it to the bend of her knee and up along her bare thigh, then pressed her hand atop his, holding him there.

  His eyes fired and his fingers flexed restlessly beneath hers as he waited for her kiss. “Just do it,” he rasped.

  “That’s a family motto,” she whispered bare inches from his lips.

  Then she looped her free hand around his neck and flung herself backward, yanking him fully clothed into the bubbling froth, laughing. Feeling free.

  MATT SURFACED WITH A shout and found himself standing nearly chest-deep. He hauled her into his arms as warm, foamy water ran down them both. “You’re insane. You know that, right?”

  She latched her legs around his waist, flung her arms wide and leaned back into the bubbles. “Sanity is over-rated, especially at a time like this.”

  She had a point—they were in an oasis of calm in the middle of a crisis, and she was in his arms. If this was crazy, maybe he was overrating sanity. But there was no way to overrate her wet, gleaming skin.

  The robe clung to her breasts but parted between and below, flaring away beneath the bubbles, so when his hands came up naturally to catch her legs where they wrapped around him, his fingers slid without interruption along sleek skin covering gloriously toned muscle.

  Murmuring approval, she slicked her hair away from her face and rose back up against him, wrapping her arms around his neck to meet him in an openmouthed, rapacious kiss.

  Heat hammered through him, around him. His shaft hardened to iron as it had been that morning when he woke thinking of her.

  They kissed, straining together in a clash of lips and tongues that nearly sent him over the edge then and there.

  His fingers tightened on her thighs, digging in as he searched for control. He wanted to drag off his pants and bury himself in her, wanted to rise over her, pin her to the tub’s edge and pound into her, claiming her as his own.

  Slow down. Hold it together. He said it over and over again in his head, clawing himself back from the brink as he held her, kissed her, touched that glorious skin where it slipped and slid against him.

  Her robe came loose. His free hand found a breast, and she arched into him. He cupped her for a moment, relearning the feel of a woman’s body, learning the feel that was hers alone. Then he slid his thumb up and across, and caught her moan in his mouth as he brushed across a peaked nipple. He kissed her cheek, her jaw, took her earlobe in his mouth and got a raw kick of pleasure from her throaty gasp and the texture of the three diamond studs that were so elementally Gigi.

  She reared back and peeled his shirt away. His balance teetered in slow motion, the two of them buoyed by the pulsing water that now touched his bare torso.

  He let momentum carry them into the shallows, then sat where a curve in the hot tub wall formed a soft niche. It was just right for a man to sit, for a woman to ride. She straddled him, bore him back against the edge, and rose over him as they kissed.

  She was naked now, her robe lost somewhere to the water, freeing him to shape the flow of her spine, the flare of her waist and the tight curves of her rear.

  His head spun. His body pulsed. For the first time in an eternity, he was entirely inside his own skin and in the moment. He wasn’t thinking or worrying, wasn’t numb. He was feeling. He felt the scrape of her teeth along his throat, the press of her lips on the puckered scar atop his shoulder, bringing mingled arousal and absolution.

  Then she straightened and, with an impish smile, disappeared beneath the bubbles. “Don’t—” he began, then groaned at the brush of her hair against his stomach, the touch of her lips along the second, larger scar, and the sensation of her fingers at the button of his fly, and then inside.

  He hissed and arched into her touch, his vision graying as her hand closed around him fleetingly, then released so she could work his pants off.

  As the clinging cloth finally came free, leaving him naked in the bubbles, she surfaced with a gasp, her eyes bright, her cheeks flushed. He reached for her and she slid up against him, so they half reclined, touching along the lengths of their bodies with her legs alongside his, her arms around his waist, the two of them locked in a kiss.

  Then she rose up over him, poised above him. They traded whispered words about safety and protection, and dealt with the necessities. But his entire attention was on need and sensation, the touch of skin on skin, and the way his flesh surged up toward her opening, seeking her. He surged against her, started to shift them and reverse their positions, but she pressed his shoulders back, her lips curving in an expression that was so wholly feminine it made his chest ache.

  She leaned in and whispered close to his ear, “How about you let someone take care of you for a change?”

  Then she shifted down and back, and he hissed out a breath as his hard tip nudged against yielding flesh and eased inside.

  “Ah,” he breathed, the noise rattling in his chest. “Tight.”

  She murmured something against his throat, then found his lips with hers, letting him control the kiss as she controlled their union. She slid down on him inch by torturous inch, until she was finally seated against him, wringing a deep groan from him that felt like it came from his toes.

  His whole body stung with pins and needles now, reawakening to pleasure at a level he had never known. His hands flexed on her hips, drawing her closer, settling her astride him until she gasped against his mouth, shuddering as he hit a spot that was sweet, tight and right.

  Her inner muscles pulsed around him, waking every neuron and tickling pleasure centers he had long forgotten. Then she began to move, in just a small, wavelike motion at first, following the rhythm
of the water surrounding them. Even those small shifts had him throwing back his head and bracing, trying to slow himself down.

  Some part of him said that he should be doing the work and making sure she came before he did, but then she picked up the pace, and chivalry lost out to “oh, hell, yeah” as everything started coming together inside him.

  Water splashed between them, around them. He let go of her hips and slapped for purchase, found hand-holds and dug in with his heels, which gave them an anchor but left him effectively bound spread-eagled in the water.

  Heat flared where she twined around him, moved against him. He sought her mouth, felt her shudder and clutch as they hit that sweet spot together, and then, too quickly, the pins and needles were racing through him, coalescing, speeding up, threatening to detonate.

  He reared up and caught her by the waist, bracing her against the side of the tub as he plunged into her once, twice, a third time, and heard her cry out as he cut loose. Bowing into her, he rode out the orgasm, emptying himself into her in a rush that blew his mind and shifted something deep inside him.

  He shuddered against her, pulsed into her, and then held her close as things leveled off and the intensity of their union eased. He kissed her cheek, her temple, wanting to say something, but unable to come up with the right words. Restless, edgy energy shifted inside him; he wasn’t even close to sated.

  The room suddenly seemed very quiet, with only the hum of machinery, the pop of bubbles and the soft throb of jazz in the background.

  It had been a long time since someone had wanted to be there for him, even temporarily, rather than the reverse. She cared for him, made him feel alive again, and he should be satisfied with that. But he found that he couldn’t uncoil, couldn’t relax, because deep down inside, he knew he hadn’t gotten all of her just then. In controlling their lovemaking, she had held part of herself in check.