by Anne Stuart
He winced, whether from pain or the sight of blood she couldn’t be sure. “Well, then,” he said, his voice not much more than a low, sexy growl, “kiss it and make it better.”
She thought about it for a moment, then, leaning forward, she kissed his mouth instead, her own lips pressing softly, questioningly against his hard ones. He still felt cool against her fevered skin, and then his mouth opened, his arm slid up around her neck, pulling her down to him, and he was as hot as she was. Suddenly the darkness was all that mattered, the darkness and his body next to hers, his mouth hungry, claiming, this time taking only yes for an answer.
Moments later she was on the floor herself, the scratchy rush matting beneath her back, Sandy Caldicott above her, his body lean and hard and pressing her into the floor. He was no longer a comic-book felon or her partner in crime, he wasn’t even a burnt-out yuppie lawyer. He was darkness, powerful, sexual, wiping out the terrors of the night and the anguish of loss and betrayal, he was life and heat and desire, and he was everything she ever needed.
His hands were wondrously, infuriatingly deft, sliding up her leg, beneath the khaki skirt, along the finely muscled line of her leg. Her own hands were far less practiced, pulling at the rugby shirt, ripping the buttons, needing his cooperation to strip it over his head. And then his chest was warm and bare against her, the chest she’d spent far too many moments eyeing with surreptitious longing. He was smooth-skinned, with only a smattering of golden hair in the middle of his chest, and the tactile sensation of his golden flesh beneath her fingertips was unbearably arousing. She whimpered with longing, back in her throat, and he swallowed the sound, his mouth hot and devouring on hers.
While she’d been fumbling with his shirt he’d managed to strip her of her skirt and sweater with such expertise that she’d scarcely been aware of it. When he lifted his head to look down at her with such fierce, heady desire she suddenly realized she was stretched out on a scratchy rug in nothing but her thin scrap of bikini underpants and lacy little bra. All her exposed flesh was tingling with desire, with heat and hunger that she hadn’t known she could feel. All the while her heart and soul were longing for him, and her brain was screaming no.
Her mouth was connected to her brain. “I don’t want this,” she said clearly. “I don’t want to feel this way.”
For a long moment he didn’t move. “If I had any sense of honor or decency I’d back off,” he said finally. “But we’ve already proven that when it comes to you my honor and decency get shot to hell. Too bad if you don’t want to feel this way—you do. You want me as much as I want you. And I’m not about to give you time and space to come up with a dozen lame excuses that will keep us both in the state of advanced frustration we’ve been suffering through for the last few days.” He dropped his mouth back onto hers with a brief, savage kiss that left her dazed and breathless. He pulled away, and that look of fierce possession was back on his face.
With one graceful movement he stood up, pulling her with him. She swayed for a moment, hoping to keep out of his arms, but she couldn’t fight both him and her own deep-rooted desires. When he swung her up into his arms she went willingly, closing her eyes in dizziness as he headed for the stairs.
“Don’t do this,” she muttered when he kicked open the bedroom door at the top of the stairs. The house had only twin beds, but it didn’t seem to daunt him. He dropped her on the bed, then reached for his belt.
“Give me one good reason, Jane,” he said, kicking off his shoes. “Just one.”
She didn’t bother trying to climb off the bed—he’d stop her and she didn’t really want to go. “If you leave me alone I might learn to trust you, respect you.”
He unzipped his pants and stripped them off. “Sorry, Jane. Tonight I don’t want trust and I don’t want respect. I want love.”
She tried one last time. “Isn’t that a euphemism?”
“Maybe for you, lady. Not for me.” He climbed onto the bed beside her, pulling her into his arms.
It was close enough to a declaration on that windswept Indian summer evening. He’d left the door open, and the only light in the cavernous second floor of the old cottage was the fitful shadows bouncing off the water. There was no one to watch, no one to listen, no one to judge. For now, for tonight, she would do what she knew she shouldn’t. She would do exactly what she wanted.
His hands slid down her body, beneath the thin bands of her panties, pulling them off and tossing them away from the bed. Her bra came off with equal simplicity, and then she was naked beside him, her long legs sliding, twining with his rougher ones.
She felt as if she’d been running, running, and she didn’t know if it was from something or to someone, maybe a little bit of both. She wanted the darkness to close around her, to wipe out the shadows and half-light, she wanted anonymity, to be alone in bed with a man she couldn’t even call by name. Alone with a man she shouldn’t want, but did.
She kept her eyes tightly closed, savoring the possession of his mouth on hers, savoring the feel of his deft, arousing hands on her body, simply wanting to lie back and be pleasured by someone else who had taken control. It was no longer her responsibility.
He pulled his mouth away from hers, and she waited for its fiery possessiveness to travel down to her aching breasts, waited for the seduction to continue.
It was a long wait. Slowly, reluctantly she opened her eyes and looked up into Sandy’s wary gray ones.
“I thought I told you,” he said, his voice husky with strain, “that I don’t provide sexual Valium and instant forgetfulness. I’m not a dream lover, Jane, here to fulfill your fantasies while you lie back with your eyes closed. This is a game for two players, lady. Ante up.”
His fully aroused body was half on top of hers, holding her captive as she tried to pull away. This time he was expecting it, and clearly he had no intention of letting her go.
“Listen, buddy, I don’t even want to be here,” she said fiercely.
“Liar.”
“I don’t want you.”
“Liar.”
She tried to hit him, but he caught her wrist, forcing it down on the mattress and holding it there. “You’re the liar,” she said in a furious undertone. It didn’t help that she was intimately aware of every square inch of flesh pressed against her, it didn’t help that her desire, rather than abating in the face of her justifiable outrage, was only growing to unmanageable proportions.
“Maybe,” he said. “Who’s being honest now?”
The room was very still. She could hear the rumble of the surf, the keening of the wind through the old windows, the pounding of her lover’s heart still pressed against her own, the steady, labored breathing of two people beyond the limits of stress. She looked up at him, keeping her own expression carefully blank as she tried to read his soul in the depths of those wicked, lying eyes.
She got the answer she wanted. “Let go of my wrists,” she said.
He stared down at her cynically. “So you can hit me again?”
“Let go of my wrists.”
He did so after only another moment of hesitation. Once released, she slid her arms around his neck, pulling him down to her, her mouth eager beneath his.
He rolled onto his back, taking her with him, and she was on fire, her hands desperate for the feel of his flesh beneath her, her mouth bold with deep, hurried kisses. He put his mouth on her breasts, and she arched her back like a cat in the intensity of her reaction, he slid his hand between her thighs and she shattered at his first gentle touch.
“Easy,” he whispered. “Easy now.” But she couldn’t, wouldn’t slow down. She was shaking all over, covered with a fine film of sweat, shivering and helpless as her needs raged out of control, unable to even say the words to beg him.
She didn’t need to. He didn’t bother to roll over. Instead he lifted her trembling body astride his, settling her carefully against him so that the heat of him rested at the center of her pulsing desire.
With a mo
an of fear and anticipation she sank down, guided by his hands on her hips, until he filled her. She let out a muffled cry at the unexpected feel of him, and the hands on her hips held her still, giving her time to accustom herself to his invasion. She bowed her head for a moment, absorbing the impact, and then she opened her eyes to meet his fierce gaze.
“I still don’t trust you,” she whispered, not giving an inch.
He grinned then, and his fingers dug into her hips as he slowly withdrew. “It doesn’t matter.” And he arched up, deep within her.
She reached out and caught his shoulders for balance, her hair a tangled curtain around her face. She rocked slightly, reveling in the sense of power it brought her, the way it made her insides clench and vibrate. She tried it again, this time more forcefully, and Sandy reacted, driving into her.
Reaching up, he put his hand behind her neck and brought her mouth down to meet his. His other hand moved between their bodies, touching her, and suddenly everything dissolved, her body, the night, the ocean air, until she was nothing but a shimmering mass of sensation.
From a long distance she felt him tense beneath her, heard the hoarse cry against her mouth, but she was past all conscious thought. She slumped against him in a welter of sweat and tears, unbearably exhausted.
Sometime later she felt his hand brush the hair from her tear-streaked face. She waited in an odd state of nerveless, lethargic tension, for him to say, “I told you so.”
He said nothing at all. His hands were impossibly gentle as they moved her to his side, his lips were warm and lingering as they brushed her mouth, her eyelids, her tear-drenched cheeks. His warm, strong body wrapped around hers, tucking her into his shoulder, protecting her. And when she heard the even cadence of his breathing, sure that he had fallen asleep, she finally gave up, nestling against him, and slept, too.
When Jane woke up hours later, she was chilled. Sandy had managed to find a blanket to pull around them on the stripped bed, but the open window blew in a stiff, northerly breeze off the ocean, and Jane knew Indian summer had gone.
It was getting light. There was no clock in sight, and it probably wouldn’t have done her much good if there’d been one. Sometime in the debacle of last night she’d been divested of her glasses, and the world was the tiniest bit fuzzy about the edges.
She only wished it could stay that way, but she knew better. Sandy was deeply asleep, protesting only faintly when she carefully slipped out of his arms. His forehead showed a fairly sizable lump beneath his tousled hair and the matted blood, and she stifled her overwhelming guilt. Their relationship had been fraught with danger from the very beginning, it was no wonder that things had escalated to full-scale disaster.
She scooped up her clothes from the floor and crept downstairs, past the debris-littered living room, on into the trashed kitchen. She surveyed the results of her fury with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she was horrified at the destruction she had wrought. On the other, she was gratified that she had finally allowed herself to vent her emotions instead of being so self-controlled.
She picked up the ripped bag of groceries, dumping the melted container of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in the sink, sniffing the heavy cream to make sure it hadn’t turned during its sojourn on the chilly floor, finding the French Roast coffee Sandy had bought. Her glasses were sitting on the counter—she had no idea how they got there, but she placed them on her nose with a sigh of relief as the world came into focus. Maybe everything would become clearer.
The porch was chilly when she stepped outside, a cup of strong brewed coffee in one hand, a handful of papers in the other. She opened the sagging screen door and went out onto the beach, digging her bare feet into the sand. The wind was whipping the waves into foaming whitecaps, the day was gray and stormy in the early-dawn light, and it matched her mood. Sinking down on the step, she took a warming sip of coffee, opened the first scrap of paper, and started to reread how Stephen Tremaine attempted, and eventually succeeded, in murdering her brother. And that was where Sandy found her, two hours later.
Chapter Fifteen
Sandy had pulled on his jeans and a cotton sweater against the early-morning chill, and he’d washed the blood from his forehead, but he still looked half-asleep. Jane could see the coffee steaming from his mug, and she wished she could ask him for a refill. But right then and there she was determined never to ask him for anything again.
Her expression must have made her feelings clear. He skirted the doorway, his face wary, and sank down cross-legged in the sand. The day had warmed up slightly, but the gray mist proved stubborn against the encroaching sun, and the chill in the air had more to do with winter than a balmy autumn.
She waited, tense, for him to say something about last night. Chances were he had a killer of a headache, chances were he wasn’t going to let things pass without making some sort of comment.
He took a sip of coffee, and the lines in his brow relaxed a bit beneath the tousled blond hair. “You said something about Stephen Tremaine killing Richard,” he said, peering out at the horizon. “What did you mean?”
She was both relieved and miffed. While she wanted last night over and forgotten, a momentary aberration in an otherwise well-regulated life, she wanted it to be her decision, not his. Nevertheless, she couldn’t afford to be choosy.
“I went through all the trash. There was a letter from Richard to his lawyer. He must have changed his mind and decided to call him instead of sending it, but he never got the chance.”
“What did the letter say?”
“That he didn’t trust Tremaine. That there’d already been an accident at Technocracies that was just a bit too coincidental, and that he wouldn’t put it past Tremaine to try it again.”
“Did he know what Tremaine wanted?”
“Apparently. My brother had a fairly cynical view of the mankind he professed to love so much. If Tremaine was trying to sell the titanium coating process to an unfriendly government, Richard would have found out. And he would have done anything, absolutely anything, to stop him. Richard could be a royal nuisance when he made up his mind about something. Tremaine wouldn’t have had any way to stop him, short of murder.”
Without a word Sandy leaned over and poured half of his still-steaming cup of coffee into her empty mug. She usually drank it back, while he laced his with cream and sugar, but still she was reluctantly grateful, gulping it down with a muttered “Thanks.”
“Show me the letter,” he said, finishing off his coffee.
She held up a crumpled, grease-stained piece of paper. “It’s taken me a while to decipher it. He said he’d call Bennett, his lawyer, from the house in Vermont. That he was going to be up there to do a little work, and to figure out how to put a spoke in Tremaine’s wheels. Which answers our question. The lab must be somewhere on our grandmother’s property in Newfield.”
“Seems logical,” Sandy said.
“But he never made it there. And when I talked to Bennett about Richard’s will he said he hadn’t heard from him in months. He must have died before he made the phone call.”
“Exactly how did Richard die?”
She glanced at him, then looked determinedly out at the rushing waves. For all the danger of her feelings for him, for all the perfidy he’d shown, she still felt pulled with an intensity she could barely fight. “His brakes failed. His car plunged over a cliff in upstate New York and ended up five miles downstream.”
“Were the brakes tampered with?”
“I wouldn’t take any bets that they weren’t. No one bothered to check. At the time it just seemed like a tragic accident. Richard wasn’t capable of simple car maintenance. He hadn’t registered or inspected his car in more than three years. It was entirely possible that he could have run out of break fluid and never noticed that his brakes were losing power.”
“What was the official cause of death?”
“I beg your pardon?” She turned her gaze from the ocean, blinking slightly. He had a red mark under
his stubby jaw, a mark that could only have come from her voracious mouth. She stared down at the sand, at two pairs of bare feet.
“On the autopsy,” he said patiently. “Was his neck broken? Any chance he was dead before he went over the cliff? We’d have a better chance of pinning something on Tremaine if we could wipe out all possibility of an accident.”
“I thought you knew,” she said, still staring at their toes.
“Knew what?”
“Richard’s body was never found. It had washed away before the car was found.”
“Damn,” Sandy muttered. “We’ll never get an indictment.”
She stirred restlessly. “I’m not interested in an indictment—Tremaine would just get off anyway. I hate to tell you, but my plans haven’t changed. The fact that you’re really a lawyer has nothing to do with this. If I wanted to work with lawyers I would have talked with Bennett. At least I know I can trust him.”
“If your darling Bennett had done his homework he would have known he could have gotten a restraining order to keep Tremaine from selling off the process,” Sandy snapped.
“My darling Bennett is one of the finest lawyers in Princeton. He was my parents’ lawyer before he worked for Richard, and he’s a happily married sixty-seven-year-old grandfather.”
His shoulders relaxed slightly. “That explains it, then. He was too old.”
“He’s better than a young shyster like you.”
She was hoping to infuriate him, but instead he merely smiled. “All right, so we don’t go about this legally. What are we going to do about it?”
“We aren’t going to do anything,” she said loftily. “I had need of a felon, not a broken-down lawyer.”
“I thought everything worked pretty well last night,” he said softly.
Jane could feel the color flood her face. “Forget about last night.”