Privilege: Special Tactical Units Division: Book Two

by Sandra Marton

She spoke before she thought. It took her by surprise. Not him. He simply clasped her arm a little more tightly and said, “Curb.”

  Dio. Did he think she needed an early warning system?

  “I see it! Just answer my question. Why did you not simply phone and ask me if—and ask me if—”

  “If you were pregnant?” He shrugged. “It didn’t seem an appropriate conversation starter.”

  Was he trying to be amusing? She couldn’t tell.

  “I would have informed you if—if—”

  “I don’t think so. You can’t even say the words now.” He came to an abrupt stop on the sidewalk and swung her towards him. “Is it so awful? The thought of you carrying my child?”

  His eyes bored into hers. The dark green irises seemed bottomless. All at once, she had the feeling that she could tumble into their depths and if she did, she would never find her way out.

  He was waiting for an answer, and she had none.

  What saved her was another roar of thunder.

  The storm had doubled back. In an instant, before the thunder had finished echoing overhead, they were standing in a downpour.

  Chay cursed, threaded his fingers through hers and ran to the curb.

  “Taxi,” he shouted, raising his hand.

  He had the New Yorker-hailing-a-cab gesture right, but there was no way a cab would stop. Taxis and rain didn’t go together. Either the vehicles magically disappeared from the streets or the drivers ignored the desperate souls trying to flag them down…

  A cab slipped out of the steady stream of traffic and set off a barrage of angry horns as it slid through two lines of vehicles and pulled up beside them.

  Amazing. Even wet, the lieutenant commanded attention.

  “Get in,” Chay said as he yanked open the door. When she hesitated, he all but pushed her inside, climbed in after her and pulled the door shut. “You want to keep arguing? Fine. We’ll argue, but I’m not in the mood to drown while we do.” He leaned forward. “Four-forty-four Thompson.”

  Bianca stared at him. “That’s my address.”

  “I hope so,” he said calmly, “because another thing I’m not in the mood for is dropping in on a stranger.”

  The cab pulled away from the curb, made a turn at the next intersection, then joined the river of traffic heading downtown on Fifth Avenue.

  “But,” Bianca said, or tried to say except her teeth were starting to chatter. She was freezing, not just wet now but drenched, and at the mercy of the taxi’s air-conditioning system.

  Chay muttered something short and succinct, and rapped on the partition.

  “Driver? Turn off that AC.”

  The cabbie started to say something. Then he glanced in the mirror, caught a look at Chay, and quickly complied.

  “I—I—I’m f—f—fine,” Bianca said.

  Chay put his arm around her and gathered her against him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I can tell.”

  His arm was hard and comforting around her and after a minute, she let out a long sigh, lay her head against his shoulder and gave up fighting the inevitable.

  He was big.

  Strong.

  Determined.

  He was intent on protecting her whether she wanted his protection or not.

  He was—she knew the appropriate term—a classic alpha male, which was just an academic’s way of saying that Chay Olivieri was really a classic bad boy, and she wasn’t into bad boys, not as a woman, not as a psychologist.

  A little tremor raced through her and it had nothing to do with being wet or cold.

  It had to do with admitting—but absolutely, positively only to herself—that what she might be into was him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Chay hadn’t spent a lot of time in New York.

  Big cities, big buildings and lots of people crowded against each other—that kind of living wasn’t his thing. Still, he’d made enough trips to the Big Apple to have gotten the hang of urban survival.

  Walk briskly. Never stroll.

  Avoid eye contact unless you meant business.

  Attitude was everything.

  So was an aura that said: Don’t fuck with me, Jack. Not unless you want to pay the price.

  All that made sense.

  Lions didn’t survive the Serengeti by being pussycats.

  Still, knowing how to survive in a city didn’t mean understanding why anybody would willingly choose to live in one.

  He thought about that as he and Bianca stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the four-story brick building where she lived in SoHo.

  As neighborhoods went, SoHo was one of the easiest to take. Not much grass or blue sky or trees, but the buildings were mostly old and, he had to admit, interesting. There was lots of cobblestone, lots of out-of-the-ordinary little restaurants, bars and shops. True, most of those places were almost painfully trendy, but Chay had to admit they were an improvement over the big, glitzy places farther uptown.

  The buildings on Bianca’s street were mostly four and five story jobs. Still, they made him feel penned in. Maybe it came of growing up in the vastness of the Dakotas. Maybe it came of spending most of his working life—the missions, anyway—in the open.

  Maybe it was because of what had happened in the coffee shop, or the phone calls Bianca had dealt with, or even that power outage. He hadn’t said anything about it to her and he wouldn’t, but even that had made him wary.

  Whatever the reason, being in a place he didn’t know, hemmed in by buildings, traffic and people, made him vaguely uneasy.

  Fortunately, he knew what to do about that feeling.

  You found yourself in a place that was new to you, you checked it out. Identified visual landmarks. Made a mental note of egress and access routes. Observed and quantified whatever creatures shared your space.

  He was living proof that survival often depended on such things. It certainly had a couple of months ago, on that mountaintop on the other side of the world.

  When Bianca started towards the brick steps that led into her building, he caught her hand, then put his arm around her.

  “Give me a minute,” he said.

  She started to tell him that standing in the rain and looking around as if they were tourists was crazy—until she realized the lieutenant looked nothing like a tourist.

  He looked like—like a warrior scoping out new terrain.

  She probably wouldn’t have said that aloud—it sounded foolish, even pretentious. But that was the only way to describe what he was doing.

  And as strange as it sounded, that tough, hard-lined awareness made her feel…

  Safe.

  So did the powerful arm holding her close.

  The ugly truth was that she hadn’t really felt safe for a long time. Not since the ugly phone calls in Texas and then the so-called hang-ups of a couple of weeks ago. She certainly hadn’t felt safe today when the power went off. And what had gone on at Cuppa Joe’s with Noah…

  No. She hadn’t felt terribly safe lately. And that was senseless, when there were logical explanations for everything that had happened.

  A patient whose mental illness had taken him over the edge.

  Kids fooling around with randomly dialed numbers.

  An electrical system that clearly had not been upgraded despite the claim that it had.

  A study subject with delusions.

  Random happenings, all of them. The scientist in her knew that. Wasn’t that one of the laws of the universe? If anything could happen, it usually did.

  But the woman in her said to hell with science. Too many bad things had happened at almost the same time. If it was silly for them to make her feel edgy, well, so be it.

  So be it, too, that a man she hardly knew could provide her with the comfort she so pathetically needed, especially since
he wasn’t a knight come to the rescue—he was a guy who was after a replay of what they’d done on a beach three thousand miles away, six long weeks ago…

  Except, that was unfair.

  Okay. Maybe he hoped to get lucky a second time.

  He was male, after all.

  But his motives in coming to see her had been honorable. Such an old-fashioned word and yet so appropriate.

  And so rare.

  She’d been with other men. Not a lot, it was true, but she wasn’t an inexperienced virgin. And though she’d always taken responsibility for herself sexually—she was on the pill—and the few men she’d slept with had been decent guys, she couldn’t imagine one of them spending so much as a minute wondering if he’d accidentally gotten her pregnant.

  She couldn’t image having sex with any one of them, either, now that Chay had shown her what sex could be like…

  “Okay.”

  For one awful moment, she thought she might have said what she’d been thinking, but when she looked up at him, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  He had no idea what had been bouncing around in her head and that was how it was going to stay.

  He smiled. Dio, why did that smile turn her inside out?

  “If we stay out here any longer, we’re gonna grow gills. How about we go dry off?”

  “An excellent plan,” Bianca said briskly. “Hot coffee. Stacks of towels. And then you can head to your hotel.”

  “Fine,” he said—and she told herself that the twinge of disappointment she felt when he didn’t object was simply the result of exhaustion.

  It had been a long day, and one she knew she would not forget.

  • • •

  Three wide brick steps led to the building’s front door—a door that opened without a key.

  Chay frowned. This wasn’t a city in which doors should open without keys. Come to think of it, there wasn’t a city in the world where that should happen.

  Would the rest of Bianca’s living arrangements be as unsafe?

  Almost, he thought grimly as she led him through a small vestibule to another door. This one, at least, was locked, but the lock was pretty much a joke, and besides, anyone could walk straight through that front door and be waiting right here for an unwary tenant.

  For Bianca.

  A staircase loomed ahead.

  “I’m four flights up,” she said.

  It was an apology as much as a warning.

  Yeah, well, he was going to owe her an apology too.

  Her plan to get rid of him after a pot of coffee and a handful of dry towels just wasn’t going to happen.

  He had every intention of sticking around for a while. What had happened at Cuppa Joe’s had shaken her, but it worried the crap out of him. Sure, he’d scared the nut job, but enough to make a lasting impression? That was the thing about crazies. You could never be sure of how they were going to behave even five minutes later.

  Besides, he thought as he followed her up the stairs, he didn’t want to leave. Not yet. He knew it sounded weird, but he felt as if he was just getting to know her. Yes, they’d had sex, but he’d never had a real look at the woman who lived inside that prickly exterior.

  He had tonight.

  And he liked what he saw.

  He’d never thought much about liking a woman before, which made this kind of interesting.

  Not that his thoughts were entirely Snow White pure.

  He could still remember having sex with her, in lush detail. And, yeah, something new in the way of a memory of those moments would be nice.

  If nothing else, he liked looking at her. She was beautiful. Natural. What you saw was what you got.

  Right now, he was getting was a great view of what was an extremely nice ass. Part of it, anyway, the part not covered by his denim jacket.

  Only a dead man wouldn’t notice, and even though he hadn’t been deployed for weeks, he was far from being dead.

  An extremely nice ass. And long legs. And great hip action.

  And, thank God, they’d finally reached the fourth-floor landing.

  Bianca paused just long enough that he wondered what she’d do if he wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her back against him so she could feel what going up the stairs behind her had accomplished.

  Slap his face, maybe, he thought, and he choked back a laugh.

  “What?” she said.

  Chay turned the laugh into a cough. “Must be coming down with a cold,” he said, “from being out in the rain so long.”

  She clucked her tongue as she marched to the end of the hall.

  “One does not acquire a cold from being out in the rain.”

  He watched her unzip the bag she carried and dig into it. And through it. And into it again. If she was searching for her keys, it looked as if it might take a while.

  He leaned against the wall and folded his arms over his chest.

  “Really,” he said.

  “Really.”

  “One does not acquire a cold from being out in the rain?”

  “No. One does—” She looked up. “Have I said something amusing?”

  What she’d said, though not in so many words, was that she was nervous. That maybe it had just occurred to her they were about to be alone in her apartment. That maybe she was as aware of him as he was of her.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Doctor?”

  “I told you. I am not a doctor. Not yet.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’m not a lieutenant. Not when I’m dressed in civvies and on a date with a woman.”

  Color surged into her face. “We are not on a date.”

  He nodded. “You’re right. We’re not. Well, we’re just going to have to do something to remedy that situation.”

  She opened her mouth and shut it again. He wanted to bend down and kiss that mouth. That soft, sweet mouth.

  How come he couldn’t stop thinking about that soft, sweet mouth?

  Yes, he’d come east for serious reasons, to find out if she was okay and to apologize for the way he’d behaved. Not for having sex with her. For the way he’d acted afterwards. She’d been upset, and instead of trying to calm her, he’d let his ego get between him and common sense.

  The thing was, he’d never had a woman want to get away from him after sex.

  Just the opposite.

  Most of his sexual encounters involved him trying to be polite even as the lady in question tried to get him to go for an encore. Well, yeah. Sometimes he’d go for an encore, but never after a session of hard, fast, unexpected sex. Times like those, he got his rocks off, so did the woman, and that was it.

  Sex with a stranger had its benefits.

  Other times, in bed, he’d roll over, hold the woman he’d just fucked for the requisite ten, fifteen minutes and then he’d get up, get dressed, get out. Okay. Not that abruptly. A quick kiss, a promise he’d be in touch, and he was gone.

  And he would call. Usually. A couple of times until the relationship—and, man, what a terrible word that was—grew stale or the warning bells began to ring.

  But he’d never been on the receiving end of what was basically a Thanks, but no thanks situation.

  This had been a first.

  Ever since, it had bothered him.

  Why hadn’t the sex been as incredible for her as it had been for him?

  Had he remembered it wrong? Had he prettied up the memory for himself? Had what he’d experienced been a hallucination?

  Or had she lied about what she’d felt that night? Jesus. It was driving him up the wall…

  And she was still pawing through that stand-in for a suitcase she carried. Chay rolled his eyes.

  “Give me that thing,” he said, grabbing the bag’s handles.

  “That thing,” she said, trying and faili
ng to hang onto it, “is my tote.”

  “Is that what you call it? I thought it was a portable closet. How can you possibly lug all this stuff around?”

  “Give it to me, Lieutenant. You will never be able to find—”

  Chay dug into the tote and pulled out a set of keys.

  “Which key?”

  She glared at him. “Give them to me. You will never figure it out.”

  He gave the keys a quick look, chose one and stabbed it into the lock.

  The door swung open.

  “Ridiculous,” he muttered.

  Bianca looked at her living room. It was small and barely furnished, but calling it ridiculous was overkill.

  “I like it,” she said stiffly. “And since I am the one who lives here—”

  “Not your apartment. What’s ridiculous is no lock on the downstairs front door. A lock on the inner one that a kid could open with a paper clip. The same kind of lock on this door, and to make things worse, an entire army of muggers and thieves could come up behind you while you spend eternity digging for your keys in—that—”

  “It is a tote bag.” Indignation glittered in her eyes. “And if you escorted me home so you could insult me, Lieutenant—”

  “I escorted you home to make sure you got here in one piece.”

  “Which I did.”

  “And to tell you I behaved like an asshole that night in California.”

  He hadn’t intended to say it quite that way. From the look of her, she hadn’t expected to hear it.

  “Oh.”

  The Tigress at a loss for words. Amazing.

  “Oh,” she said again. “Well then, I accept your—”

  “Could we have this conversation after I check out your apartment?”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know for what. Errant phone calls. Looney Tunes patients. Just stand here while I take a fast look, okay?”

  He dropped the tote on the floor.

  She huffed out a breath, folded her arms, waited impatiently while he moved quickly through the dollhouse-size living room, bedroom, kitchen and bath. In truth, she was glad he was doing it. Surely his diligence was unnecessary, but she had to admit that it was comforting.

  “Okay.” He came back to her, put his palm against the door and slammed it shut. “And you’re got it wrong. I’m not apologizing for making love to you.”