by BETH KERY
He lifted his hand and slapped her ass once, then twice. “Come,” he ordered tautly.
Sophie opened her eyes in shock as her body instinctively followed his order. Orgasm crashed into her. She had a flashing vision of Thomas’s face—tight, wild, and determined—before he drove deep. She felt him swell and jerk inside of her, the sensation causing a fresh wave of climax to surge through her. He gave a sharp yell and grimaced in pleasure. She felt his cock twitch as he came and his shout segued to a low, primal growl as he flexed his hips and fucked her while he exploded into the condom. Sophie grabbed onto his shoulders while they weathered the storm.
Slowly, she felt the tension leave the rock-hard muscles she clutched in her hands. His pumping hips stilled. He held himself off her with his arms, his chin falling forward to touch his chest.
Their heavy, ragged breath twined in the still room. Sophie became aware by degrees that a soft rain pattered on the window-pane. Without thinking about what she was doing, she placed her palm on Thomas’s chest, wanting to feel his heartbeat, wondering if it raced just as madly as hers did.
He looked up slowly, his bangs casting his eyes in shadow. His nostrils flared slightly when he glanced down at her breasts.
“I feel like there’s a bomb ticking inside me.”
She reached and pushed his hair off his damp brow.
“Maybe it would help if you talked about it. You need to try to put it into words, Thomas,” she whispered.
She sucked air into her lungs when he suddenly withdrew. His grimace told her the abrupt separation hadn’t been pleasant for him, either. He came down next to her on the bed.
“Talking isn’t going to bring Rick and Abel back. No amount of ‘processing’ can bring a person back to life,” he stated starkly when his head hit the pillow. “I warned you to stay clear of me, Sophie.”
His voice had gone so quiet, she barely heard the last.
“Do you want to leave, Thomas?”
He lifted his head and looked at her before he sagged back on the pillow. “I don’t. I want to be here for some reason. At least for a few days . . . or for however long you can put up with me.”
“I asked you to come here for some peace and quiet while you try to come to terms with things, Thomas. I haven’t changed my mind.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment as they listened to the rain falling. Thomas stared up at the ceiling. Sophie wondered if he thought of what had occurred that evening: the FBI agents calling upon Thomas, their heated lovemaking in her office . . . the frightening explosion at the warehouse.
How was he making sense of it all?
“Sophie?” he asked gruffly after a moment.
“Yes?”
“Are you sure you don’t know anything about that explosion?”
“I know I’m still freaked out about it.” He turned his head and gave her a searching look. “I know as much as you know about that explosion, Thomas.”
“How did you know to warn me? From going inside Mannero’s warehouse?”
“I told you, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was just worried about you. Your behavior has alarmed me.”
“And you genuinely believe that asking me to Haven Lake,” he paused and she felt his stare all the way down to her navel, “is going to help?”
Sophie inhaled slowly. She, more than most, knew the power of placebo. She met his gaze unflinchingly.
“Yes.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The ringing phone didn’t disturb his wife’s sleep. It didn’t surprise him. He’d seen her take the sleeping pill her doctor had prescribed her last week and had already learned of the medication’s profound effect on her.
He, on the other hand, had barely slept in days. On one or two occasions, he’d been tempted to take one of his wife’s pills, but there’d been too much at stake to be caught unaware, befuddled and vulnerable from chemically induced sleep.
Plenty of time to sleep when you were dead.
He didn’t answer the phone until he’d walked into the large den that was down the hall from the master bedroom suite and shut the door. It was a residential phone, one that was regularly checked for surveillance.
“What took you so long in getting back?” he growled into the receiver without a greeting.
“I’m sorry. Things got a little hectic.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t pull it off.”
“No . . . no, the deal went off just fine. From what I’ve heard, it was quite a fireworks display.”
He paused, his jaw clenching tight as realization hit him. “Jesus. By ‘a little hectic’ don’t tell me you lost him? Again? After he fell right into your pocket today by showing up at his condo and then his office?”
“It wasn’t my fault. Listen, we tailed him from his office building, but then he went to the one place in the city where you specifically said you didn’t want us anywhere near tonight.”
“He went to the warehouse? Is he alive?”
“Yeah. I thought at first he might have caught the heat there himself, but I told Flavio to cruise down the street while things were still hot. He doesn’t have a record,” Garnier said rapidly, obviously sensing he was about to be reprimanded for the news. “There’s nothing on Flavio, nothing the feds could trace back to us even if they did have the area under surveillance.”
“And?” he asked tautly.
“Nicasio’s car wasn’t in the parking lot,” Garnier admitted.
A pain went through his chest at the news. His goddamn acid reflux had been biting at him from the inside out for weeks now. “Do you mean to say you have no fucking idea where he is?”
“Don’t worry,” Garnier said grimly. “We have his condo and his office staked out, his club, favorite restaurant, Kelly’s house, plus the residences of most of his friends. He hasn’t been seeing anyone regularly for the past few months, but I put a couple guys on the residences of two of his former girlfriends. Figured it couldn’t hurt.”
“He’s seeing that redhead. The interior designer.”
“Not according to the redhead,” Garnier said flatly. “He hasn’t called her in weeks. But like I said, we’re watching her place, just in case.”
He inhaled slowly, tamping down his temper with effort.
“We need that tape. Are you sure you’ve checked everywhere that you can?”
Garnier grunted. “He’s got it with him. He has to. Try not to worry too much. All it takes is one phone call from his cell phone and our contact at the phone company will be able to give us his location within fifty yards.”
“All it will take is one phone call from him, you asshole!”
A silence ensued following his outburst. He clutched at his chest, knowing his employee had been caught off guard by his uncustomary show of fury.
“If he uses his cell phone to contact one person—just one—we’ll have him. How much damage could he actually do in a few hours?” asked Garnier.
“Think apocalyptic, you stupid son of a bitch. You’d better rattle around those rocks in your head, Garnier, and figure out exactly where he is. If you think I’m going to wait around for him to make the phone call that’ll ruin me in order to find him, you’re even more of an idiot that I thought you were.”
When Garnier was chastised into silence, he cursed under his breath and sagged into his leather desk chair.
“He’s just like his father,” he mumbled after a pause.
“Leave it to me, and he’ll end up exactly like his father,” Garnier promised.
He hung up the phone a few seconds later, willing the stabbing pain in his chest to ease. After a moment, he stood and shuffled down the hallway toward his sleeping wife, weariness weighting every muscle in his body.
A lifetime of effort, and for what? he thought bitterly.
He could withstand many things, and fate had forced him to do so. But if there was one thing he couldn’t tolerate, it was disloyalty.
Disloyalty had to be stamped out at all costs.
Thomas listened to the shower running in Sophie’s private bathroom. She’d insisted upon showering after they’d made love, and he’d been too tired to protest her absence in his arms.
The thought of her warm and naked in the shower made his cock stir. Again. He told himself to get up and join her in the shower. He even prepared to do so by fully removing all his clothes. Once he’d stripped, however, a wave of exhaustion struck him.
He hadn’t been sleeping well since Rick’s death.
No, that wasn’t right. His sleep had been fractured and irregular for a week before Rick died. Ever since his brother had come to him, distraught and agitated about what he’d discovered in his investigative report about the Chicago mob.
He shut his eyelids and pressed his chest into the mattress, as though he were applying pressure to a gaping wound. He turned his face into the pillow and inhaled Sophie’s scent—floral, female . . . clean.
She’d implied he was ill . . . sick at heart, that a few days of relaxing at Haven Lake would serve him well. Thomas didn’t know if he believed her or not, but the thought of staying in the peaceful house . . . the prospect of spending time with Sophie appealed to him, feeling like a balm on the bloodied edges of his ragged spirit. He’d call his parents tomorrow; tell them he’d decided to get away for the weekend.
A pang of guilt and unease went through him when he thought of how his father would react to the Mannero warehouse explosion. He’d call Joseph Carlisle first thing in the morning, he promised himself. Thomas should be the one to tell his father instead of having him hear it from Fisk and Larue, who would be eager to somehow implicate his father in the arson.
For the destruction of those records Thomas had gone to examine.
He clamped his eyelids shut, willing his mind to clear. While he’d been making love to Sophie, he hadn’t even noticed his pervasive headache, but it throbbed to life now, the pain dull and muted, but still clouding his thoughts.
He knew the real world would interfere at some point with his avoidance of it. Chances were Fisk hadn’t identified them at Mannero’s warehouse. Even so, the FBI would want to question Thomas in regard to the explosion. They’d be asking for him. It was only a matter of time before he’d have to return to Chicago to be with his parents during this trying time.
But didn’t he deserve a temporary escape?
He buried his nose farther in the pillowcase and breathed Sophie’s scent, letting it soothe his agitation. The clean, white cotton reminded him of her underwear. It’d been incredibly exciting watching her undress, seeing her reveal all her firm curves and skin that reminded him of apricots and cream. He would never have guessed he’d find a modest, low-heeled pair of pumps, an old-fashioned padded brassiere, and white cotton panties sexy, but on Sophie, it was an image that defined erotic.
For him, anyway.
He’d insisted upon inhaling the scent from her panties while she’d watched. The memory of how wet the panel had been; the image of her wide eyes when he’d inhaled her delicate, delicious fragrance made his cock stiffen next to the cool sheets.
He’d wanted to shock her a little. He hated himself for always wanting to dirty her, but that didn’t stop the beast in him from craving to do just that: to desecrate the shrine of sex and innocence that was Sophie. When he thought about how he’d fucked her so savagely in her office . . . how he’d ridden her so hard just minutes ago, he twisted in discomfort on the bed.
But his damn cock swelled to full readiness yet again.
He knew it wasn’t right for him to take out all his unrest, his grief, his fury on her . . . but his regret wasn’t sufficient to make him walk away from her potent allure.
And it wasn’t as if she didn’t seem interested. Her large, dark eyes may hold a hint of trepidation at times, but she couldn’t hide her arousal. He’d never known a woman to get so wet. All that warm, sweet cream, Thomas thought as he wrapped his hand around his erection and stroked himself. Eating her had been like drowning in sex-honey. And when he’d spanked her, the flush of liquid heat around his cock had sent her right over the edge.
Sophie may look like the image of wholesome beauty, but she’d been turned on by being spanked.
He groaned when he realized he was pumping his cock . . . recognized he was conjuring all sorts of fantasies about Sophie in his mind. Stupid fantasies. Like he was a horny seventeen-year-old all over again.
He pictured himself getting up and entering the humid bathroom, joining Sophie in the shower . . . bending her over and driving his cock into her tight, warm heat. The fantasy was so realistic that his hand moved desperately.
Why didn’t he get up? Why didn’t he walk into that bathroom and just do it?
But he knew why he didn’t, Thomas realized as he graphically imagined his cock hammering into her soft, giving body while he gently smacked her firm, damp ass. He’d already fucked her like a maniac twice tonight. Held her down on her desk and slaked his monumental thirst; spread her wide here in bed and drilled her until she’d screamed in release.
Sophie’d had enough. Even if he hadn’t.
He winced as he came, careful to keep the erupting semen from soiling her sheets. When he heard the shower shut off, he reached for some tissues from the bedside table and cleaned himself off. He’d thrown away the tissues and gotten back in bed by the time she came out of the bathroom.
She believed he was sleeping, he realized, as he watched her pad quietly toward the bureau. She carefully opened the top drawer. He said nothing, enjoying the chance to observe her while she was unaware. She dropped the towel that she’d wrapped around her. His eyebrows went up in interest when she bent to lace her feet through some clean panties. She silently opened another drawer and started to withdraw a T-shirt.
“Uh-uh. Come to bed, Sophie.”
She started and looked over her shoulder. She set the shirt on the dresser and walked toward him. He watched, appreciating the erotic contrast between her round hips and narrow waist . . . the slight sway of her breasts as she moved.
It was a good thing he had masturbated, he thought wryly as she slid beneath the sheet. She switched off the lamp and he pulled her into his arms, appreciating the shower-warmed softness of her skin in the air-conditioned room. The odor of some kind of fruity soap or lotion and Sophie just beneath it filled his nose. He settled her back against his chest and kissed the top of her head. Her soft sigh brushed across his forearm, making his skin prickle.
It didn’t matter that he’d just come. He wanted her again. Some powerful combination of grief, anxiety, and Sophie Gable had transformed him into something insatiable.
He determinedly closed his eyes and let the exhaustion that was never too far from the periphery of his consciousness claim him.
He dreamt of the summer following his parents’ murders—the summer he’d gone to live with the Carlisle family. In his dream, Rick and he were kids again in the outfield at Briar Park on a muggy summer day. Joseph—their Little League coach—was in the dugout, a powerful presence always at the periphery of Thomas’s awareness.
Thomas’s depression and grief over the sudden, inexplicable loss of his entire world had taken the form of surliness and anger. At ten years old, Thomas more resembled a teenage rebel than the vulnerable child that he was. Joseph had recruited him onto Rick’s baseball team in order to give him something to focus on other than the empty hole that had opened up in the center of his chest.
The only person in the Carlisle household he didn’t cop an attitude toward was Joseph. In the beginning, Iris Carlisle, Joseph’s wife, seemed at a loss for how to reach him. He’d wanted nothing to do with her maternal warmth and kindness. She wasn’t his mother, and Thomas resented her for reminding him of his mom with her concerned eyes and soft touches.
Joseph, on the other hand, had been a good decade and a half older than both Iris and his own parents. His thick mane of iron-gray hair, broad grin, and sparkling blue eyes made Thomas associate him more with a grand
father or uncle than the father figure he would have likely rejected out of grief from missing his own dad.
His adoptive father took pride in his working-class roots despite having risen through the ranks of the business world to be the owner of a large, prosperous trucking company. Joseph Carlisle was a man’s man, and it didn’t take a young Thomas long to discover that Joseph was impatient at Ricky’s lack of interest in sports and other stereotypical boyish activities. Ricky had no talent for sports, and that simple fact acted like a splinter under Joseph Carlisle’s skin.
Rick had been a year older than his adoptive brother, but Thomas was bigger, even when they first met. Not in weight—Rick actually still carried his baby fat, which he never lost until adolescence—but Thomas was the taller of the two. Thomas possessed a whole different set of genes than Ricky, genes that had made him enjoy and excel at the things Joseph Carlisle found worthwhile like sports. Ricky, on the other hand, would have been happy to be left alone, reading his novels of high adventure or dreaming up his own stories, which he recorded in a black notebook he kept carefully hidden beneath his bed.
Joseph Carlisle’s square jaw would have clamped tight and his eyes blazed with anger if he’d ever discovered that notebook full of his son’s dreams.
You need to get out of the house, get some fresh air . . . run around like a normal boy, Joseph used to growl in frustration. In his first few months at the Carlisle house, Thomas had smirked every time he’d heard Joseph admonish Ricky. He’d been so confused and bitter by the abrupt absence of the two pillars that had previously held up his entire world that he’d taken a kind of sick satisfaction from seeing the pinched, pained expression on Ricky’s face when he heard his father’s familiar litany.
In Thomas’s dream, he stood on the pitcher’s mound and followed a fly ball headed toward right field. Ricky staggered around on his chubby legs, trying to follow the ball as he squinted into the bright sunlight. Thomas’d once heard Joseph tell one of the assistant coaches that since Ricky was their weak spot, they’d put him in right field to diminish their losses.