by Ann Major
Vapors were still steaming off his bronzed skin when he opened the bedroom door and stepped into the pitch-black room. The whiskey and the hot water had relaxed him.
A soft sound came from the bed.
Something white flashed in the darkness.
A shiver of apprehension traced the length of his spine. He wasn’t alone, and he was as naked as the day he was born. His shotgun was in the other room.
His every predatory instinct sprang instantly to life. Panic and long-conditioned reflexes made him lunge toward the bed to grab the intruder. Garret was intent upon immobilizing whomever had broken into his cabin and was laying in wait for him.
His muscled legs straddled a slim body on the bed. His callused hand ran the delicate length of a slender throat, touched the delicious softness of a breast.
A woman.
In shock he jerked his hand away just as she started to scream. His other hand, which had been tangled in long strands of her silken hair, now clamped over her mouth. She squirmed, twisting her neck, flailing her arms, writhing, and he heard the sound of silk shredding. She bit him, and this time, it was he who screamed.
He cursed in low but vivid French.
She began to struggle in earnest. More silk tore. He only pushed her deeper into the bed, using the weight of his more powerful body to crush out her resistance. He felt her breasts pushing against his chest. Her heart was pounding. She was gasping for air. Her strength was nothing to his, and he subdued her effortlessly.
He inhaled the haunting sweetness of musk rose—a woman’s perfume. Something about that scent was oddly, disquietingly familiar. But because of the whiskey, he couldn’t think clearly.
Her body was twisting against his, rubbing itself tightly against his naked muscles. Since he didn’t have a stitch on, her every movement of silk and skin made him intimately aware of her.
Damn.
She tried to kick him, but the soft sensation of her leg against his naked flesh only rocked his senses. He willed himself not to react to the feminine feel of her body beneath his, but he was aware of piercingly hot sensations of pleasure every time her legs brushed against his thighs. He cursed himself roundly again. He hadn’t had a woman under him in more than a year, especially not one as soft and delicate and dear to him as she was.
Her nearness, her constant wiggling made him start to tremble. “Stop moving,” he rasped. “I won’t hurt you.”
But she kept moving, and he felt an aftershock of male desire every time her legs or hands brushed him.
The feel of her, the heat of her—she was slim but lushly built—the smell of her, were all faintly familiar, and aroused in him feelings of confused mutiny. He was shaking with a starving need for the woman and was furious at her and at himself because of his reaction.
“If you didn’t want this, you shouldn’t have climbed into my bed in the middle of the night, chere,” he whispered in a low sardonic drawl slurred by whiskey and angry desire. “Stop moving before I do something we both regret.”
“Garret...” A woman’s voice, breathless and faint with fear, slightly accented, as soft as velvet, filled the darkness with its voluptuous femininity.
Instant recognition went through him. Noelle... The musk rose... Subconsciously he must have known at once. That was why his body had reacted.
Knowing it was her made him hotter. She had climbed into his bed in the middle of the night. That could only mean one thing—she was inviting him to bed her.
His heart filled with dark hate. He stiffened. The last time she’d come to him, and he’d given in to his desire for her, she’d nearly destroyed him.
The warmth of her breath wafted over his dark face. He remembered their kiss in her shop. It was a struggle to maintain his sanity and not to take her instantly, swiftly.
“Noelle? What are...?”
“I—I was waiting for you,” she murmured. “I came out to see you, but you weren’t here. I came inside because of the mosquitoes and the rain. Then you didn’t come back, and I got so tired. I must have fallen asleep...hours ago. I didn’t know who you were at first.”
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said roughly, but he felt the old unwanted wildness she had always aroused building inside him.
Somewhere in the back of his mind a voice was shouting for him to run from the room, to leave her, to go before it was too late. He had vowed never again to give her the chance to ensnare his heart. But he felt dizzy, bewildered. The whiskey... Her nearness... His naked oak-hard thighs straddling her hips. Her body under his had always been a perfect fit.
“I want to go to the captain and tell him—”
“Stay the hell away from him! Do you hear me?”
She was the reincarnation of a thousand male fantasies. She was sweetness, femininity—and woman. She was the love of his youth. The fantasy girl who lived in a dream world just out of reach. The woman he had always wanted—no matter what she’d done. She had come back into his life after Annie’s death when he was losing his mind to grief. Noelle had given herself to him, given him the will to go on living despite the tragedy. Her love and friendship, though casually given, had made Louis blossom, if ever so briefly.
Every male cell in Garret’s body was on fire.
He released her and started to draw back.
Then she touched him.
As he had not been touched since she’d left him. As he’d dreamed of her touching him again. With fingertips that were as hot as flame, as gentle as satin rippling down the hard length of his backbone.
“I want to hate you, too, Garret,” she whispered with tears in her voice.
He wanted to resist her, but a blackness swam in front of his eyes. A madness gripped his heart. He was aware only of the velvet warmth of her fingertips gliding across his skin, touching him everywhere. He felt the damp and coolness of the November night. He saw the flashes of lightning and heard the intermittent crackle of thunder.
Her hands explored him gently. She was devouring his stubborn will by degrees, slowly, steadily wearing him down. And suddenly he was all mixed up. There was a throbbing ache in his gut. Her soft caresses were a wordless comfort in the darkness of his torment. He wanted to take her into his arms, to hold on to her, to stop being the hardened cop who had to act like he was too tough to feel anything. For too long he had ached for the simple comfort of being touched[JO33]. Suddenly he was shaking.
Her gentle hands touched his bare, muscled shoulders, slid around his neck, caressed his throat. It felt so good to be tenderly petted. Treacherously good. Somehow it eased the terrible anger inside him, so he didn’t stop her. Her touch was tender and kind. Although he knew not to trust kindness from her, it was the one thing he longed for.
Once he had thought she was kind—and gentle, so different from him.
She turned her hand over and with the backs of her fingers she traced his brow, the length of his straight nose. Tenderly she stroked his cheek, the hard line of his jaw, taking inventory of his uncompromisingly masculine features, like a blind person, with her fingertips. He felt her hands in the curling blackness of his hair.
He’d been alone so long. He knew just how beautiful she was...and how treacherous. He imagined her coppery hair and her voluptuous, full-bosomed figure. Too well he remembered the flawless perfection of her features—her pale skin, her black winged brows, her startlingly whiskey-colored eyes fringed with thick sooty lashes, her aquiline nose, and her full, sensuous mouth.
He remembered her family as well, aristocrats, all of them, all but her scandalous mother anyway, people who thought their daughter too good to associate with a man who’d been their former cook’s son, for a man who’d lived hard on the streets of New Orleans before he’d become a cop.
He swallowed to maintain control. Once he’d thought Noelle was different from her family. Now he knew better. Still, it would be so easy to take her, to use her, to forget, if only for one night.
The taste of whiskey was bitter and hot in his mouth
. He wanted to replace the taste of it with the taste of Noelle.
If he did that, the senator would really be gunning for him. He might never work as a cop in New Orleans again. He damn sure didn’t want to spend the rest of his life cooking at Mannie’s. But if he moved, he’d have to start over, at the bottom in any other city police department—in the academy. If there was one thing Garret hated the thought of, it was being on the bottom again.
“Two years ago you all but destroyed me—for the second time. Not to mention what you did to Louis. What the hell are you doing here tonight?” Garret growled savagely.
Again her voice came, soft, throaty, filling the darkness like sexy French music. “You threw me out two years ago!”
“Because—”
“Because, like my family, you were too ready to believe the worst of me. I’m just as determined to forget you as you are to forget me. My family wants me to marry Beau. I wouldn’t be here except last week you risked your job to save me, despite what you thought I’d done to you.”
“What I thought!” he snarled.
“Shh. I don’t want to quarrel. Why can’t we put the past behind us and just go on with our own lives? We grew up together. Can’t we at least be friends?
Friends? Them? Hell, no, they couldn’t be friends!
“I came here because I want to help you get your job back,” she said. “Then I saw that you’re still out here all alone, and I can’t bear the thought of that, of Louis growing up without even knowing you.”
“He knows me.”
“He doesn’t live with you, does he?”
He didn’t reply.
“You can’t shut the world out. No wonder Louis acts the way he does.”
“Forget Louis. Don’t you go near him.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“I won’t have him hurt all over again!”
“Oh, so you think he’ll be okay if he hides from anything that might make him feel something, the way you do?”
“Don’t tell me how to live my life. Just go back to your world. You don’t belong here. Not with me.”
“I want to help you get out of this, Garret. Is that so wrong?”
“Yes,” he muttered darkly. “Yes. Go home. Where you belong.”
“Sometimes I wonder where I do belong.”
His lips curved in cynical disbelief. “Well, you damn sure don’t belong here. I know what you want. You don’t give a damn about Louis or me.” His tone was insolent. “And it’s something your prim-and-proper Beaumont can’t ever give you. You’ve always had a taste for the wrong kind of man.”
Once before he’d driven her away with words like that.
“No...” Her voice was raw with hurt.
He started to get up. He was halfway across the room when a series of low, heart-wrenching sobs stopped him.
Was she crying? He had never been able to stand to hear a woman cry. Maybe the only reason she’d driven out here was to help him; maybe she really was worried about him. If that were true, he’d acted like a drunken brute[JO34]. She sounded so utterly hopeless that his anger and determination to fight her melted.
He clenched his hands into fists. He had to go.
Another sob broke the silence.
She was crying because of him, and the sound of her unhappiness stunned him. Why couldn’t he just walk out of the room and leave her? Why did every low sniffle and gasp tear at him?
He called to her across the darkness. “Noelle...”
He received no answer. Only more heartbreaking sobs.
Softly: “Don’t cry, chere, no.”
Still no answer. Nothing but darkness and the guilty knowledge that her misery was at least partly his fault. He could see the shape of her. She lay on the bed, her face buried in his pillow, her flaming hair spilling over her slender body that was racked with sobs. She looked so tiny, so helpless—so utterly forlorn.
Because of him.
Some emotion that he didn’t want and didn’t understand pushed all else aside. He went to her and pulled her into his arms.
She felt hot and soft, all female. Skin to silk; man to woman. As always she felt incredibly good.
“Oh, Garret,” she breathed. Her arms went around him. Her fingers threaded themselves through his hair. “You’re so impossible, and yet I always get so mixed up when I’m around you. I want to hate you the same way you hate me. More than anything in the world, I want that. But I don’t know what I feel. I only know I’m sorry that I’ve ruined everything for you again. And as for Louis—I loved him. I still do.”
“Shut up about Louis!”
More sobs broke from her.
Garret’s grip tightened around her. “There, there, Noelle. Shh, chere. I’m glad you’re here,” he murmured. “But you shouldn’t have come. We’re not any good for each other. You know that.” He stroked her back and her hair.
Finally she quieted and lay still against him. Slowly, once more, he grew aware of her body against his, of the light silken dress that lay between his skin and hers. She smelled of that wild Mediterranean flower, and he rubbed his hand across her cheek and tenderly kissed her forehead. He felt her lush breasts pressing against his bare chest; he felt her nipples bud into hardened tips. His breath caught in his throat.
“Noelle,” he whispered warningly, “you should go.”
She kissed his throat passionately. “Stay with me. If only for tonight. I know it’s crazy, and I know tomorrow I’ll hate myself more than ever. But...now...I just want to be with you.”
He wanted to hate her, too, but the whiskey was blurring the hate, mixing it into a potent combination of desire and need and lonely desperation. He remembered the wild fear he’d felt in front of her shop when he’d been scared she might get gunned down the way Annie had. Very slowly he sank down beside her and pulled her against his body.
In the darkness, as he lay with her in his arms, he was too keenly aware of her warmth and softness to sleep. She kept him on edge, made him want to take her, but he was determined not to do that.
Some time during the night it began to rain, gently, sweetly, and she snuggled even closer to him.
She was a comfort, an unwanted one.
His first since he’d thrown her out two years ago.
Chapter Four
Noelle’s dream was vivid, full color, truer than real life. She was alone in her mother’s shop hiding behind a wild assortment of nineteenth-century statues and furniture: two immense stone lions from Russia, a carved-walnut bear love seat from the Black Forest, and a Biedermeier table.
She was alone with the gun and the stolen money. The cops were closing in on her.
They knew she’d helped the bank robber escape.
Only Garret wasn’t there to save her. He had abandoned her as he had that other nightmarish night.
She was stumbling through a clutter of salon furniture, past an American staghorn chair, trying to find the ladder that led to the attic and the roof. Only she couldn’t find it.
The police kept coming closer.
She knew they would catch her and put her in jail, and her family would have to endure a new humiliation because of her.
She stumbled against a chair and fell. The dim light from the window cast bars across the wall, across her face. A tight band circled her throat, choking her. Noelle tried to scream, but she could manage no more than the hopeless, soundless scream of nightmares.
“Noelle?” The husky male voice against her ear was pleasantly familiar.
Garret had come.
She felt safe. After an eternity of terror.
He would know what to do.
She was aware of the immense comforting shape of him in the darkness. Blindly she reached for him, groped for his granite strength.
“Chere...”
His arms had long since gone around her, locking her small body against the bulwark of his. So many times he’d held her like that—as a child, as a woman. She touched his bare muscled back, slid her hands ar
ound him and clung to him, trembling uncontrollably in his arms. The band around her throat loosened.
Garret had buried his face in the wealth of her hair. “What’s wrong, chere?”
Outside it was raining. She was reminded of that long, dark night when the rain had slashed at the hospital window, the night she’d screamed and screamed for him, the night she’d nearly died, the night she’d miscarried their child, the night he’d never come, the night she’d never believed she could forgive him.
She drew a deep, shaking breath and closed her eyes. “I dreamed...of the robbery again. Only the cops knew I...”
“I have nightmares sometimes, too,” he said gently. “Terrible dreams. A crook has me cornered. I pull the trigger, but my gun won’t shoot. Or the bullets just roll out of my gun and land at his feet. I never told anybody about those dreams before.” Garret ran his hands lightly through her hair.
Her eyes were laden with tears. “Oh, Garret, I’ve had this same dream every night for a week.” Her words were guttered shudderingly against his chest, her hands clutching him. She didn’t tell him of the other nightmares.
“I know, chere.”
“O-only you’re never there.”
“I’m here now.”
She was still trembling, but his grip was tight and comforting.
“What I did at the bank scares me now. I shouldn’t have done it. You’re in trouble because of me.”
“I’ve been in trouble before.”
“I have to go to tell your captain the truth.”
“No!”
Her mouth was pressed into the hollow of Garret’s throat, so she was aware of the exact moment when his pulse quickened abruptly. She licked her lips and involuntarily her tongue flicked against the beating pulse. She felt him tense with excitement.
“Noelle...” he whispered hoarsely, recoiling.
But she ignored his warning. It felt too right to quit.
“Don’t push me away,” she pleaded against his throat. “You can’t go on like this, forever alone...hurting...not letting anybody near.” She knew that path—too well. Her lips grazed his throat again. This time deliberately.