by Rachel Lee
She felt bereft, already missing the sultry heat of his mouth. That made her think of that night on the beach and his mouth at her breast, his tongue on her nipple, and she almost cried out at the memory, wishing he would do it again, right here, right now….
“How much do you trust that Closed sign?” he asked, his voice thick.
It took her a moment to fight through the golden haze and realize what he meant. When she realized why he was asking, that he apparently had every intention of fulfilling the wish she’d just silently made, her breath left her in a rush. It was as if he’d read her mind.
Right here, right now…
Right here, on her office desk. Right now, in the middle of the day.
She shuddered in his arms, some wild part of her that she’d never even known existed screaming out yes. She felt the heat pooling low and deep as her body readied for him, readied for the consummation of the shocking, overwhelming urge to let Luke McGuire make love to her this instant. To let him peel away her clothes until she was naked in this place that, until now, had only meant her world of books to her. To strip him naked, as well, so that she could look her fill under the bright office lights that would let her see every beautiful male inch of him.
An image of them together flashed through her mind, more erotic than any of the imaginings she’d become prey to since he’d arrived.
“Damn,” Luke muttered harshly. “I want to know what you were just thinking, but you’ve got me so hot already, I’m afraid if you tell me, I’ll go off right now.”
Amelia moaned. Luke pushed her back to lie on the desk, and she didn’t even notice the edge of her calendar digging into her back. Not when Luke stepped between her knees and began to tug at the buttons of her blouse. In moments he had bared her breasts, and Amelia could feel the cool breath of the air-conditioning over her skin. She thought of how his mouth would feel, hot and wet and delicious compared to that coolness. She nearly cried out under the force of her body’s response simply to the image in her mind.
For a moment that seemed like an eternity Luke didn’t move. Amelia couldn’t stop herself from arching upward, offering her breasts, begging without words.
Luke move swiftly then, one hand on her left breast, his fingers rolling and twisting the nipple, while his head darted to the other, taking the nipple and suckling it deep and hard while his tongue teased the tip.
She did cry out then, and her body rippled under the wave of rich, hot sensation.
The phone rang.
Luke swore. Amelia whimpered.
It rang again.
Luke straightened up. Amelia whimpered.
The third ring. She had it set on five during the day, so she could get to it from the storage room.
Or, in this case, from where she was spread half-naked across her desk, wishing Luke would just ignore the ringing and go back to what he’d been doing.
With a whimper she smothered this time, Amelia sat up.
She answered the phone.
“Ms. Blair? This is Elizabeth Adams, at Santiago Beach Bank.”
Amelia tried to focus. She vaguely remembered the woman, one of the supervisors at her branch. “Yes?”
“Did you write a check today for the amount of five hundred dollars?”
“What?” she asked, tugging her blouse closed while still fighting the glorious fog Luke had put her in. “No. No, I didn’t.”
“Are you missing any checks?”
That got her attention. “From my business account? I don’t think so, but let me look.”
She sat down the phone, slid to her feet and walked around the desk, feeling herself flush as she realized how close she’d come to having what she could only call wild sex atop her desk blotter.
She shook her head sharply to clear the last of the haze. She unlocked her desk and pulled out the large, notebook-style business checkbook. Luke was watching, still clearly aroused, still breathing hard and fast. She nearly forgot the phone as she stood there staring at him. Then she flipped open the checkbook.
She sank down in her office chair.
“Trouble?” Luke asked, his voice still showing a trace of the earlier sexy huskiness.
“Five hundred dollars worth, it seems,” she said, reaching for the phone. “Mrs. Adams? Yes, I seem to be missing a single check.”
“Number thirty-five oh-two?”
“Yes. I gather someone used it?”
She fought the panic rising in her, wondering what else might be missing, and how this had happened in the first place. She closed her eyes, thinking.
“Tried to, this morning, at our branch at Pacific Center.” Another pause. Amelia concentrated. And then it struck her. The day Snake and his cohorts had come in, the day she’d showed him his knife in the book…she had been paying bills that morning. She knew she had shoved the checkbook under the counter, but one of them had been right there; if he’d leaned far enough, he could have seen it.
“Did you hire some new help?” the woman from the bank asked.
“No, I haven’t. Is that what they said?”
“Yes. Our teller caught it, luckily. He usually works here, but he was filling in at the other branch. The signature didn’t look right to him, and the person was very nervous, so he asked a couple of questions, enough to scare him off.”
“Bless him,” Amelia said as she finished rebuttoning her blouse. “I hope he gets a raise.”
Elizabeth chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“A young man, Eric said. Not eighteen, he didn’t think.”
Amelia sighed. “That explains it. I had a group of rather…unfriendly kids in here a couple of days ago.”
“We have his photo on our branch security video. Could you come down and take a look, make an identification for the police report?”
“I…yes, I could. When?”
“As soon as possible. We want to turn it and the check over to the police by end of business.”
“All right.”
She hung up. She was reeling a bit; the change from hot, eager passion to the chill of the phone call was dizzying. Then Luke was there, his hands on her shoulders, steadying her.
“What’s wrong?”
She explained what had happened, and her suspicions that it was one of Snake’s cohorts.
“They’re stupider than I thought,” Luke muttered.
“I have to go look at the security film.”
“Now?”
She nodded mutely. He was upset, she thought. She was upset. But he said nothing except, “Let’s go.”
They were ready for her, and when she sat in the back office in front of a television screen, she was thinking how to explain that she had no idea who any of the boys really were. She could identify Snake, of course, and maybe most of the others, but she didn’t know their real names. She didn’t think Luke did, either; they’d let him in because she’d told them he knew the boys she suspected, although he hadn’t been a witness to the incident where they took the check.
The screen flickered, and she turned her attention to it. They’d cued it up right to where the boy was at the teller window with the stolen check.
It was David.
Chapter 14
Luke didn’t know which made him feel the sickest, looking at his brother’s unmistakable image on the videotape or at Amelia’s face as she watched it.
She looked stunned.
He was furious.
Maybe David did feel let down, maybe he felt betrayed. But that was no reason for him to turn around and in turn betray the only person in Santiago Beach who had genuinely wanted to help him.
“You look surprised,” Mrs. Adams said. “It’s not who you expected?”
Amelia swallowed. She looked at Luke. He waited. He wouldn’t blame her if she turned David in; he was halfway tempted to do it himself. She had every right; the boy had abused her trust and her friendship, and deserved whatever he got.
My, wha
t a holier-than-thou hypocrite you’ve become, he said wryly to himself. That had been said more than once about him, he was sure.
But he was still angry. David had hurt Amelia, and he didn’t like that. At all. His reaction was so fierce it startled him, but before he had time to analyze that, Amelia was answering the bank supervisor.
“I think…this may have been just a misunderstanding,” she was saying. “Can you hold off contacting the police until I can talk to the boy?”
Mrs. Adams frowned, but after a moment agreed. “Since he didn’t succeed, and he’s known to you, then I suppose we can. Just please keep me posted.”
“I will,” Amelia promised.
They were outside, next to her car, before Luke trusted himself to speak.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did.”
He shook his head. “He shouldn’t have stolen from you.”
“If he did, you’re right. But I don’t recall David ever being around when I had the checkbook out. Besides…”
She lowered her gaze, and Luke wondered what she’d been about to say. “Besides…what?”
She took an unsteady breath. “I can’t help wondering what might have changed if somebody had ever looked not at what you’d done, but why.”
After a moment during which he had to blink against a sudden stinging behind his eyelids, he reached out and lifted her chin with a gentle finger.
“You,” he said softly, “are amazing, Amelia Blair.”
Her eyes widened, and her lips parted for a quick breath. He resisted the urge to kiss her right there on the street, although it was difficult.
“We have to find him,” she said. “I just can’t believe David would do that. There has to be an explanation.”
She was a lot more optimistic than he was. “We haven’t been able to find him yet, and he’ll probably be hiding even deeper now. He’s got to know the bank would report this.”
“But he only tried, he didn’t actually do anything.”
“Only because the teller was on his toes,” he pointed out. It felt odd, her being the one most strongly defending David, but he really was furious. “As far as I know, attempted forgery’s a crime, too.”
She looked at him curiously. “Why are you so angry?”
“You mean when it’s no worse than some of the things I did?” he snapped.
“I didn’t say that.” Amelia’s voice was quiet, making his own snarling reply sound even worse.
“I’m sorry,” he said, ramming a hand through his hair. “He’s my brother, and I want to help him, but damn it, why you? If he was angry enough to steal, it should have been from me. I’m the one he thinks let him down.”
At first she just looked at him, but then she smiled, a slow, small smile he could only call mysterious.
“I’m sure he’s not thinking that clearly,” she said after a moment. “He’s feeling deserted, abandoned, by his mother, then his father, and now you. So he’s striking out blindly.”
His mouth quirked. “Been reading psychology books?”
“On occasion. But this is just common sense. Besides, what do you have here to steal that he could get to? He could hardly ride your motorcycle away, and I don’t think he’s up to picking your pocket or breaking into your room.”
“Yet,” Luke muttered.
“We have to find him, Luke,” she repeated.
“I’m open to suggestions,” he said. “I’ve looked everywhere I can think of.”
“Then we’ll look again. And I’ll call your mother to make sure he hasn’t turned up there.”
He grimaced. “You sure you want to do that?”
“No, she’s the last person I want to talk to right now. But this is for David.”
He had the thought later, as she was making the call from the new cell phone she’d gotten to replace the one stomped in the fight, that if she would go this far just for a boy she’d sort of taken under wing, what would she do for someone she really loved?
Just about anything, he guessed.
It was a novel idea to someone who’d lived his life as a nuisance, a hindrance and a general source of aggravation to the one who, according to tradition, should be willing to do anything for him.
He didn’t dare wonder what it would be like to be one of those Amelia loved and would do anything for.
Moments later she severed the connection. “He hasn’t come home. She’s still going to call the police if he hasn’t turned up by dark.”
“Okay, Amelia,” he said. “We’ll look again.”
This wasn’t, Luke thought dryly, what he’d hoped to be doing with her all afternoon.
Of course, he hadn’t expected her to say yes, either.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t worried about David. He’d gotten over most of his anger, except that he still wanted to shake the kid for ripping off Amelia, of all people.
It was just that he wanted desperately to explore the fire that blossomed between them every time they touched. And he felt guilty because he wanted to do that even more than he wanted to look for David. He wasn’t sure they could find him, anyway; he knew that if the kid truly didn’t want to be found, there were places where he could hide for days, even in Santiago Beach. He knew, because he’d done it. He’d checked all the areas he knew of, but there had to be more.
But he would look. Because Amelia felt they had to. And he supposed she was right; he was just feeling a bit cranky about it.
He followed her to her house, where he left his bike parked safely off the street, and then they took her car. She turned the wheel back over to him while she called all of David’s friends she had numbers for. Sadly, as had happened before, they said only that they didn’t see much of David anymore, since he’d starting hanging out with Snake’s crowd.
They checked the smoothie stand at the pier, the burger place on the coast road, the pizza place by the high school, not really expecting to find anything.
They were right about that, Luke was thinking, when Amelia suddenly said, “What if we see Snake or one of his pack?”
He’d thought about that and had a pretty good idea what he would do. “Wolves have packs, not snakes,” was all he said.
But Amelia studied him for a moment, then said, “Shall I take that as you planning to pry whatever they know out of them by whatever means necessary?”
He shot her a startled glance. She looked back at him with an exaggeratedly innocent expression.
“You,” he said, “are dangerous.”
“Me? You’re the dangerous one. Just ask anybody,” she said sweetly.
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, but underneath the mock irritation, he was delighted. She was actually teasing him. It must have been true, what she’d said, that she’d been drawn to him in spite of his reputation. And once he’d explained that the reputation no longer applied, she’d relaxed.
And decided she wanted him.
He was surprised he didn’t grunt at the force of the need that suddenly cramped his body. His grip tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles were white. He felt like he did when he shot over class five-falls; he was flying and not at all sure how he would land.
Probably wrong, he thought dryly. At least on most falls he knew what he was headed for. These were unscouted rapids, and he had no idea.
He hung on as they went from place to place, but his mind was barely on what they were doing. He kept having flashbacks of those moments in her office, wondering at how swiftly he’d been out of control and seconds away from taking her right there on her desk. He was on a slow, steady boil, until he was sure one touch, one trace of an echoing hunger in her eyes, and he would lose it.
Think of something else. Anything else.
He headed toward the downtown area, driving slowly, trying to think. It had been a long time since he’d had to think like a kid trying to hide, and things had changed around here in the past eight years. The old shoe store was gone, along with the hidden space under th
e stairway behind it, and the old, shut-down theater that had made a good hiding place if you could get in had been razed.
Stopped at the Main Street signal, he tapped his fingers on the wheel, trying to use a teenager’s logic. It hadn’t been that long, after all. His mouth quirked. If David had been younger, he would have tried his early favorite, the place he’d had to quit using when he turned fourteen and grew nearly six inches over the summer.
Grew nearly six inches.
“Luke? Did you think of something?”
“I think,” he said, “I finally thought of something I should have thought of a long time ago.”
“What?”
“Got a flashlight in the car?”
“Yes, under the seat. Why?”
“It’ll help,” he said as he maneuvered over to the right-turn lane, thankful for once for the town’s relative lack of midday traffic. He turned onto Main and headed toward the library.
Amelia looked at him as they pulled into the parking lot.
“The library? Surely he wouldn’t try to hide in there, would he? He must realize people will be looking for him.”
“Not in,” Luke said. “Under.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure if it’s still there, but there was a crawl space under the building, in the back. Because it’s on a hill, at one end it’s high enough to sit upright. Up until I was fourteen it was, anyway.”
Amelia looked at him for a long moment. “And how much time did you spend there?”
“A lot,” he admitted. “And I kept it quiet. I knew they’d close the access if they knew. But then I grew about half a foot over one summer, and it got too cramped.”
Amelia thought about that a moment and arrived at the conclusion he had finally reached. “David’s shorter than you.”
He nodded. “I should have realized it sooner,” he said with disgust. “I thought about it when I first got back in town, but I’d sort of mentally crossed it off the list because at his age, I had to quit using it. I was thinking age, not size.”