Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2)

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  “Hello, Not-Bart,” he said.

  I winced. “This is Nick. From Dallas. Nick, Rashidi.”

  Rashidi was one of my best friends, a University of the Virgin Islands botany professor, and the one who had introduced me to Annalise in the first place when he was moonlighting as a rainforest tour guide. Now he was house-sitting until she was ready for me to move in. I had forgotten to expect him. There were other things on my mind.

  “Nice to meet you,” Nick said.

  “We were just leaving,” I added. “We’ll meet you by the garage.”

  I squeezed around Nick on the narrow balcony and he followed me through the house. In the kitchen, he slipped his arms around me from behind and stopped me for a few last kisses, but we made it out to the driveway without too much delay. We found Rashidi sitting on the hood of his red Jeep, chewing on a stalk of sugar cane.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’ll introduce you properly tomorrow. We’re in kind of a hurry.”

  Rashidi’s smile was all teeth. “Yah mon. I got what I came for,” he said, pinching the front of his shirt and giving it a shake, “so I off to town for now.” He hopped off the hood and got in the Jeep. Just before he put it in gear, he rolled down the window and called out, “Have fun, Katie and Not-Bart,” then drove away.

  Nick shook his head and laughed. The dogs settled by the garage door in the dirt, their usual sleeping spot. We walked the fifteen yards to my truck, hands entwined, my skin tingling where it met his. We were leaving, but where would we go—back to his hotel? I shivered and hoped he didn’t notice. He didn’t release my hand until momentum forced our hands apart when we went our separate ways to get into the truck.

  I climbed in and reached to turn the keys in the ignition, but they weren’t there. Nick got in and scooched toward me as I turned on the dome light and scanned the seat.

  “I can’t find my keys. I thought for sure I left them in here. I always do.”

  “Oh, no. I don’t have them.”

  I searched inside and Nick searched outside, to no avail. I perched on the seat, half in and half out of the truck, facing Nick. “I guess we need to retrace our steps,” I said.

  “Nah, I have a better idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Let’s go parking.”

  Before I could answer, he was crawling into the truck and on top of me, lowering me onto my back on the bench seat. I let out an involuntary but surely quite sexy “oomph.” A few wriggling, grasping minutes later, I broke lip lock. “Not here.”

  Nick mumbled, “What’s wrong with here?” and reattached his lips to mine.

  I thought of the five dogs outside the truck and Rashidi showing up again with us behind nothing but clear glass. I spoke without detaching this time. “Somewhere else, somewhere more private.”

  Nick lifted his head a fraction of an inch and I could feel him thinking.

  “Have you ever hotwired a car before?” he asked.

  “Of course not. My dad was the Dallas chief of police. I didn’t run around with bad boys.”

  “Well, you do now. Or at least a good boy who can hotwire your car.”

  “And you know this how?”

  He grinned. “It’s better if you don’t ask that. I need something with a small, flat tip to use as a lever, like a knife or something, and a couple of bobby pins.” He leaned back down and kissed the breath out of me. “And I think we should hurry.”

  I hurried. The bobby pin was easy. They were scattered all over the floor of the truck. But a flat-tipped object to use as a lever? I reached down and pulled out the machete Ava had instructed me to keep beneath my seat. “How about this?”

  Nick slid down me, in a very nice way, and to his feet outside the door. “Now that’s what I call a knife,” he said in a bad Australian accent. “A little big, though. Do you have a flathead screwdriver?”

  I pointed to the giant toolbox I had in my truck bed, because that is how a butt-kicking goddess in the St. Marcos rainforest rolls. “Back there,” I said. “But, really, shouldn’t we search the house first?”

  Nick winked. “Who knows where they could be, and we’re in a hurry. A very, very big hurry.”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket and used it as a flashlight. I heard my tools tumbling around as he made a shamble out of my organizational system, but he was back in seconds with a screwdriver. I moved aside to let him in and he set to work quickly.

  “In these old trucks like yours, it’s easy,” he said, removing screws one by one from the steering wheel cover until it fell onto the floorboard with a plop. Every nerve in my body tingled with anticipation. The whole slightly-criminal-past thing was unexpected, and hot. I wondered how my father would have felt about Nick. And how my kindergarten-teacher mother would have, for that matter.

  “You have to pull the wire harness out of the steering wheel, like so. This is the female end, with openings for each wire that comes in the back.”

  “Cool,” I said, and leaned in to kiss the dark skin below his ear. If he thought I was paying any attention, he was mistaken, but I liked the rumble of his voice from his chest.

  “That’s going to slow me down,” he said, but he didn’t sound upset about it. “I need to find the wires for the power supply, the starter, and the dashboard. Power is usually red, the dashboard normally has some yellow, and the starter is generally green.”

  “Um hmmm,” I said. My hand snaked its way to his nicely defined chest somehow. Not on purpose, of course.

  “You’re being very bad.” He turned his head just enough that I could catch his lips in mine for a moment, then pulled away. “Focus, Kovacs, focus. OK, I’ll stick one end of the bobby pin into the yellow wire’s dashboard hole like so. Then I’ll stick the other end of the bobby pin into the red power hole. Ouch!”

  I stopped. “What’s wrong?”

  “Old thing gave me a little shock. Not bad, though. It’s only twelve volts.” He tried again. The dashboard lit up, and I lit up with it. This was almost better than sex.

  “Now we leave the bobby pin in here like this until we want to turn the car off. Then we just pull it out.”

  I was pretty sure I was going to start rubbing against him like a cat if he didn’t finish soon.

  “Now we stick a second bobby pin in the red power hole, and the other end into the hole with the green starter wire, and leave it there until the engine engages.”

  The engine started to crank, then caught.

  My stomach flipped with the engine. One step closer to wherever we were going and whatever we would do there. Nick jumped out and ran around to the passenger seat and I crawled into the driving position.

  “You make that look awfully easy,” I said as I put the truck in drive and pressed the accelerator.

  “Years of practice,” he admitted. “But it’s not so easy if you don’t have bobby pins. Then you have to rip the wires out of the harness and twist the right ones together. Or if you have a new car with one of those electronic anti-theft devices, then you’re SOL unless you’re a semi-pro thief.” He put his hand on my leg a few inches above my knee and gently squeezed. It tickled just enough for me to jump a little.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I’m staying at Stoper’s Reef. How about we go there?”

  I held myself to a smile that I hoped didn’t look easy. “I think that would be all right.”

  The Reef was on the near side of Taino, which was better known as just “Town.” In fact, it was only five minutes away from Ava’s house, so I was driving a route I knew well. Clouds had gathered in front of the moon and the road was dark. The trees closed in on both sides, leaving a narrow path that blended with its surroundings except for the tunnel of light beamed ahead of us by my truck. We barreled through the black corridor.

  I curled my fingers around Nick’s, which were still curled around my thigh. He flipped his hand and took mine, then started stroking my fingers with his. Twenty agonizingly long minutes later, we rea
ched Nick’s hotel and parked next to the building. I jumped barefooted out of the truck.

  “This way,” he said, and I followed.

  Chapter Eight

  Nick opened the door to his hotel room and flipped on the light switch. My mouth went dry and I froze, feeling exposed in the garish light. I had waited so long for this, imagined it so many times. Hell, I’d already had more orgasms than I could count with this man, none of which had required his actual presence. What was wrong with me?

  He turned to look back at me. “Are you OK?”

  I nodded.

  I would be so much better with a rum punch. Or a Bloody Mary. Anything with alcohol in it would work, would take the edge off, would make me less me and more sexy.

  Nick smiled at me and my hot face burst into flames.

  “Come on in,” he said. He reached out for my hand and pulled me to him, kicked the door shut with one foot, and slid the other hand around my waist, drawing me in and saying those last words with our lips touching, which ended up as much nibbling as speaking, and resulted in a free-falling kiss.

  Oh. My. God.

  Kissing had never seemed like a big deal to me. With Bart, I’d gotten to the point where I would rather we did the deed and skipped the kissing part. I thought it was invasive and animalistic. But I was so wrong—I just hadn’t been kissing the right guy.

  With Nick, my insides swirled and my hands moved of their own accord. Oh, the lean, hard shape of him under my palms, the too-good-to-be-true sensation of his skin under my fingertips as my hands found their way under his shirt. His fingers floated up my arms and across my shoulders, down my chest and up my sides, sliding in and out of the edges of my dress to tease my breasts. Somehow, without me even realizing it, Nick found his way under my skirt and his fingers walked up my thighs and across the front of my panties. I gasped and he shoved his hands under the bodice and sent the dress over my head and onto the floor.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said.

  He held me away from him and his eyes burned as they roamed over me. He skimmed his palms down my arms and caught my hands in his. I closed my eyes.

  “Katie?”

  It was so much easier to feel sexy in a blue Michael Kors dress than standing naked under a hotel light. I prayed that he wouldn’t notice the dimpled parts of me. I prayed that I could keep my mouth shut about the lights.

  “The lights,” I said, failing.

  “I’ll close my eyes.”

  “But Nick,” I said.

  He kissed my nose. “No problem.”

  I exhaled and opened my eyes. Nick had his back to me as he pulled his shirt off. Muscles rippled under his brown skin. He flicked off the light switch and as soon as the room darkened, I felt a wave of released tension. I heard the rustle of his shorts as he unbuttoned them and kicked them off. Then his body met mine, full contact from knee to shoulders, and his skin warmed the places where mine had cooled as soon as he moved away.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “Of course,” he said.

  He started moving me slowly backwards by my shoulders. When the backs of my knees met the edge of the bed, he pressed one hand into the small of my back, then slid his other hand around to cradle my neck. He lowered me onto the bed and moved above me so smoothly that our lips never broke contact. He reached down and removed my last article of clothing, and I did the same for him.

  But even as the front of me enjoyed Nick, the back of me realized I was naked on a hotel bedspread, with God knows what kind of ground-in awfulness rubbing against my skin.

  “The bedspread,” I said, choking on the words and hating myself for not holding them in, for not being a wanton sex kitten who could make whoopie on a filthy unwashed hotel comforter and think nothing of it. He was going to think I was an even bigger disaster than he already did.

  But he laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted out.

  “Damn, Katie, I’ve missed you.”

  He pulled the bedspread back, then the top sheet. I rolled onto the bottom sheet and he pulled the offending linens underneath him and tossed them to the floor.

  “No bedbugs now. Are we good?”

  “I swear that’s it,” I said, and I could feel the blush in my cheeks. I knew I needed therapy, and a lot of it, but that was a problem for another day. Now, I was here, and I was not going to screw this moment up any further. I channeled my inner sex goddess. “Come ravage me senseless.”

  He lowered his lips to mine and I could still feel the smile on his lips when he kissed me. A happy warmth caught fire somewhere above my feet and below my head, somewhere nice.

  “You have to hold perfectly still now while I get to know you,” he said.

  I wriggled my toes and the warmth grew. “Hi, Nick, I’m Katie,” I said, and he cut me off with a kiss so deep I felt like I was falling backwards into a cloud. And then he kept his word and explored all of me, slowly, bit by bit and part by part, finally surfing his olive-skinned body up the length of mine until I shivered and bit into his shoulder. My wriggling spread from my toes up my body, and he seemed to like it.

  “OK, you can move now,” he said.

  An explosion went off in my brain, and I transformed into someone I had never been before, someone carnal and sensual, someone brazen. “I can’t believe how gorgeous you—” I started to say, but I never finished my thought, as Nick’s hand found just the right spot. I managed a gasp, and then his mouth was on mine, rough and urgent this time, and mine was, too. I began to touch him again, and his entire body stiffened.

  “What about, you know,” he managed to say.

  “I’ve got it covered.”

  “Thank God.”

  And he was inside me, and it was simply everything. It was everything, and everything else was nothing, nothing but the two of us in that bed. It was tender, then barely restrained, then desperate, wild, and needful. And it was us, together, and we knew, we both knew, that this was not the way it was for the rest of the world. This was for us alone. The world stopped spinning and hung suspended in the sky while we came, together, long, and hard. How could sex be this?

  In the trembling moments afterward, joined together and holding on as tightly as we could, I spoke first.

  “That was . . . different . . . better . . . remarkable. Oh God, I sound like an idiot who’s never had sex before. Not that I have sex all the time. But I have had sex, of course, and, oh, I think I’ll shut up now.” I held my breath as he pressed his nose against mine, his lips against mine, and all the rest of him against me as well.

  “That was the most amazing thing ever. Ev-er,” he said. He pulled his head back and I could see the shine of his eyes even in the dark.

  “You are awfully good at this,” I said.

  He kissed me on the tip of the nose. “We are. We are awfully good at this together.”

  “Imagine if we practiced.”

  “Oh, I plan for us to practice. A lot.”

  I really, really liked the sound of that.

  Chapter Nine

  I tingled and jangled my way out of sleep, my body reliving the night before, and opened my eyes to find Nick looking at me.

  “Hello, beautiful.”

  “Good morning.” My voice rasped as it tried to wake up.

  “I watched you sleep half the night.”

  “I hope I didn’t snore,” I said. I had gotten up once to go to the bathroom, and I remembered that he had snored, but in an unguarded way that was kind of nice.

  “Un poquito.”

  I groaned and put my face in his chest, then turned my head so I could speak. “I had the oddest dream right before I woke up.” My words came out slowly as I yawned and stretched without sacrificing body contact. “I dreamed you and I were on a beach, with my dogs, and an old West Indian woman walked up, and . . .”

  Nick interrupted me. “Read your palm.”

  “Yeeeessssssss. How did you know that?”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “Y
ou aren’t going to believe this, but I was having the exact same dream when I woke up.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yet it’s true.” He rubbed his cheek against mine.

  “She said I was an empress. What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s cool.” He lifted his head back up and I put my hands carefully on his familiar yet new face. I closed my eyes and let the energy fill me up. I could get so used to this.

  Nick’s phone buzzed and he blew air out between his closed lips. I pulled my hands away from his cheeks. He rolled over and fumbled his hand around on the floor until he found his shorts and pulled the phone out of his pocket.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  My stomach tightened. “What is it?”

  “Texts from my sister. Her stalker boyfriend found my condo.”

  Shit. Shit shit shit. I edited myself before I spoke. “Are they OK?”

  His thumbs flew as he texted. “I’m not sure.” He pulled on his underwear and stood up, then dialed the phone and began to speak intensely to the agitated female voice that answered on the other end.

  I stacked pillows against the headboard, wrapped the sheet around me, and sat with my arms around my knees, watching him as he paced. When Nick gets upset, his face takes on a “harbinger of death come to claim your soul” look. In such a sexy way that it occurred to me that the interruption would probably hurt less with my clothes off. But they were already off, and it hurt plenty.

  I slithered out of bed with the sheet around me and retrieved my heap of a dress from the floor. I tiptoed into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. The woman looking back at me had a fright wig of crunchy red hair that screamed “I stayed up all night having Animal Planet sex.” My repeated applications of Emily-inspired Aqua Net during the pageant the night before had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it was time for a bucket of water over the head. That would take care of the wandering eyeliner and stage-mascara’d eyelashes, too.