by Lisa Childs
A sharp keening noise rent the air, and it astounded Lindsey that it emanated from her throat. Her world splintered in flashes of pleasure so intense it was painful. Again and again she came.
Another guttural cry filled the air and Dylan collapsed onto his strong arms, gallantly holding most of his weight from her.
With the convulsing muscles inside, Lindsey pulled him closer.
He groaned again. “You’re killing me!”
Lindsey expelled a breath strong enough to stir her bangs, which were sticky with sweat. Then she dragged him closer, welcoming his strong, heavy chest crushing her breasts. She licked his ear and pushed his hair back from his forehead.
“You never what?” The reporter in her had to know.
He chuckled. “I never felt anything like this, never so much. But then, it’s you.” He rolled to his side, holding her tight in his arms.
Lindsey tucked her head under his strong chin, feeling cherished and protected. “And finally, it’s you.” She sighed. Her girlish fantasies had been so tame compared to the devastating sensual reality of Dylan Matthews.
Usually she expected too much. Her heart ached over the thought of leaving his arms. The thought became reality as he loosened his hold and slipped from the bed.
Lindsey’s mouth fell open, a protest ready. But he touched a finger to her lips.
“I’ll be right back.” And he swaggered into the bathroom off the bedroom.
She swallowed a sigh over the sight of his dimpled backside and glanced around the room of her adolescence. She’d dreamed many dreams of Dylan Matthews in this room with the faded pink roses and gauzy curtains.
Her room hadn’t been damaged in the fire but for the scent. Special machines had taken care of that, and Marge had offered to help her redecorate. But Retha Warner had chosen those roses for her daughter’s room, and Lindsey hadn’t wanted to replace them.
Where was her mother now? Was she warm? Was she hungry? Lindsey sighed.
Dylan slid back into bed and took her in his arms. “You okay?”
She nodded, the fear for her mother choking her throat.
He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, she covered his lips with hers.
Breaking away from the swift and sweet kiss, she murmured, “It’s all right. I know. This was just this, just the moment.”
“Just this? You don’t want anything else?” He stroked a finger down her cheek.
Her heart ached with the lie she had to tell. But the last thing she wanted was for him to feel sorry for her. She’d had enough of other people’s pity.
“No, what would be the point? Once my mother is found, and I find out whether or not I have a brother, I’ll probably leave. Will you stay?”
Dylan gently tipped her head back, and he searched her eyes. But she had no idea for what he searched. “I’ll be staying. I don’t know why. But I’ll be staying.”
Lindsey nodded and fought the tears that threatened. He wouldn’t have come back for her. He’d never seen her as anything other than a pest.
“You didn’t argue with me earlier,” she said.
“About?”
“About my mother. You don’t believe she and the killer are the same.”
Dylan sighed, and Lindsey’s heart over flowed with the dread already filling it. “I don’t know, Lindsey. Like you, I don’t want to think she is.”
“Where can she be?” Horrible images of her mother, hurt and alone, flashed through her mind.
Dylan shrugged. “As distracted as you made me, she could be on the other side of the bedroom door. I don’t know. I’m working on it. I didn’t come here for this—”
“I know that. I threw myself at you again, and this time you caught me. It’s okay. I already said I really didn’t expect anything from you.”
But her foolish heart called her a liar. She’d expected everything from him. But she doubted he had it to give. Because of all the tragedies he’d lived through, he’d locked away his heart long ago. It must have been the only way he’d found to deal with the pain.
“But I expected something from me, Lindsey. I expected to stay focused on your safety.”
Lindsey laughed and snuggled closer in his strong arms. “Oh, I wouldn’t agree with that. You were pretty focused, Dylan. If you were any more focused, I’d be dead right now.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
She glanced into the seriousness in his eyes. He worried about her. Her heart did a crazy little flip. “It’s okay. Don’t worry. Maybe everything that has happened has been a coincidence, accidents. Nobody wants to harm either of us.”
“I never believed anyone wanted to harm you, Lindsey. I’ve only thought you were in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man.”
She’d been with the wrong man before, but not this time. Dylan Matthews was the only right man for her. She’d known it when she was sixteen, and she knew it now.
While she had him naked in her bed, she intended to take advantage of it. Later she’d worry about gluing back together her shattered heart.
Her fingers trailed slowly down his side, over his slim hip.
“Lindsey,” he warned again, but his voice cracked with the threat.
Lindsey didn’t heed his warning. She stroked and teased until his breathing grew ragged and his hands restless. He rolled them until she straddled him, and then he reached to the side of the bed, rooting around the items spilled from her purse, for his wallet.
Instead of bringing up a foil packet, he held a velvet jeweler’s box in his hand. “What’s this?” He didn’t wait for her answer but popped open the case to reveal the diamond solitaire she’d worn for more than a year.
“Old news.” She covered his hand with hers and snapped the lid closed.
“You’re not still engaged.”
She dropped a kiss on his chest. “And doing this with you? I’m not that way.”
“But you didn’t give it back.”
She shrugged. “You don’t know the rules of etiquette about broken engagements? Guess that’s good. You must have never had one. When the man breaks it off, the woman gets to keep the ring. Of course, I tried to give it back, anyway. He didn’t want it. His new fiancée, probably wife by now, has a bigger one. I’m going to mail it back.”
Dylan dropped the ring box on the floor and cupped her cheek in his callused palm. “I want to hurt him, like he hurt you.” His blue eyes burned.
“I hurt me,” she corrected him. “He wasn’t the man I wanted him to be.” She realized that now. She’d wanted him to be Dylan Matthews. It wasn’t her ex-fiancé’s fault he wasn’t.
“You’re generous.” He pulled her down for a deep kiss.
Lindsey gave all, her entire heart, which had been his for more than a decade.
She smiled when he finally eased away. “No, I’m not. I hope he’s miserable with his new honey and that the news pa per fires him. So I’m not generous at all.”
Dylan laughed then, laughed so hard she nearly jiggled off his chest. “I’ll remember that.” He reached on the floor and pulled a foil packet from the wallet he’d found.
“You do that, Deputy Matthews.”
He threw back his head and groaned as he entered her. “You’re so tight, so perfect, Lindsey.”
“I’ll take perfect,” she murmured, smiling over his lie. Then she began to move, setting a pace, which he matched with a frenzied rhythm.
He took her higher and higher until Lindsey thought she had nothing left to give. Then she gave more. He growled out a victory cry and pulled her tight to his chest.
Lindsey’s heart beat in perfect accord with his. Fast. Fast and then slower as the satisfaction put the passion to simmer. She’d never get enough of Dylan Matthews.
“Go to sleep now.” He stroked her tangled hair. “You’re exhausted.”
“Yeah,” she sleepily agreed. She relished the safety and security of being held tight in his arms. “You, too. Go to sleep, Dylan.”
“I’ll hold you while you sleep even though you’d be safer with me gone,” he muttered.
She ran a finger over his tense jaw. “You’ve protected me, Dylan. You’ve kept me safe from danger.”
He snorted. “I’ve been the danger, Lindsey. Without me, you’d have nothing you’d need protecting from.”
She couldn’t argue with him there. Without him, she wouldn’t have had to protect her foolish heart. She’d already failed miserably at that.
Chapter Nine
DYLAN wore his uniform this time. Despite his summons, his visit to Evan Quade’s office was official. The summons rankled, though. The businessman’s secretary rapped on the door and opened it for Dylan.
Quade faced the windows; his gaze focused on the traffic below him.
“I don’t have time to drop everything and run when you or your boss call.” Dylan didn’t bother keeping the resentment from his voice.
“We’ve been waiting for you.”
“We? Hutchins is here?” Then Dylan noticed the profusion of silky black curls spilling over the back of a leather chair.
“I believe Ms. Warner is your old friend.”
Dylan ignored the man and mentally demanded that Lindsey turn around and face him. But then he wasn’t eager to face her. He’d slipped out of her rumpled bed sometime last night and hadn’t talked to her since. He had no idea what to say.
She’d humbled him with her passion, and she’d introduced him to his own. He’d never wanted like that, had never needed someone as he’d needed her. Desire clawed through his gut. As he still needed her.
“This is an official visit, Quade. I need to ask you some questions. I can’t do that with a reporter present.”
Quade quirked a brow. “Then I guess the questions will have to wait. I called Ms. Warner here as I believe the press would be interested in knowing who’s the trustee of the property Hutchins Enterprises is trying to get rezoned. Did you get your subpoena yet?”
Dylan nodded. “It’s in motion now. I should know who the trustee is within the hour.”
A mocking smile slid over the businessman’s face. “Can you wait that long?”
Dylan bit the inside of his cheek. “You know?”
The dark head nodded. “Money talks.”
Lindsey spoke up then. “There’s another part to that saying. Do you have proof?”
A smile spread over Dylan’s face at her cynicism.
Quade ran a finger down the crease of his suit jacket sleeve. “I have no reason to lie.”
“Really.” An hour. Could he afford to wait that long? “You could be protecting someone. I want to talk to Sarah.”
Quade shook his head. “Not possible.”
“I’ll get a warrant.”
Quade laughed. “What would be your cause?”
Dylan took a step closer to the chair where Lindsey sat. She knew nearly as much about the case as he did. “She’s a suspect.”
“Mrs. Hutchins?” Quade almost succeeded in sounding shocked.
“Sarah,” Lindsey confirmed. “She’s quite bitter about the past.”
“She was left carrying a dead man’s child,” Quade ground out. “She has reason to be bitter.” He visibly shook himself and straightened his tailored suit. “Of course, the bitterness has passed. She’s a happily married woman, wife to one of the most powerful men in the Midwest.”
“And mother to my nephew,” Dylan added. “Whom she doesn’t want me to see. Easiest way to accomplish that would be to permanently get rid of me, like with the gunshots in our motel room after we left her house.”
Quade chuckled and waved his hand. “That’s not the easiest way. She has legions of lawyers to accomplish that without ever raising her own finger.”
“I never said she pulled the trigger herself.” Dylan folded his arms over his chest, so he wouldn’t reach out a hand for Lindsey’s hair. “I’ve checked you out.”
“Did you hear I’m psychic? I would know you two had decided to stay the night when you had only to travel thirty minutes to Winter Falls? And I would know where you’d stay if you stopped due to the fog?”
His patronizing tone made Dylan clench his fists, but Lindsey laughed. “And you’d have us believe you didn’t have one of your security guards follow us the minute we’d left your office? You don’t think Dylan, with his ten years of police work in Detroit, would miss a tail?”
He fought the smile from his face over Lindsey’s bluff. No one had followed them that night. But he only raised a brow as Quade had earlier.
“Hmm…” Quade’s dark eyes held laughter. “Touché, Ms. Warner.”
Dylan clenched his fists again and ground his teeth when Lindsey’s tinkling laughter rang out. She’d still not turned toward him.
“Lindsey,” he said in the threatening tone he used exclusively for her.
She laughed. “So who are you trying to throw suspicion on?”
Merriment danced in Quade’s dark eyes. “The person who has the most to gain from the mall project.”
“You and Hutchins,” Lindsey said.
Quade shook his head. “We’re already millionaires, both of us. What’s more to us? But millions to a person who’s never had them—that’s something worth killing for.”
“You’re saying the person who owns the land you’ve optioned for the mall?” Lindsey’s pen poised over her pad.
Dylan had come to that realization on his own. Only the slow wheels of justice had withheld the identity from him. And now Quade.
“I don’t want this in the paper, Lindsey.” He stared down Quade.
Lindsey sniffed. “That was our deal. Not yet. Who is it?”
“The sheriff.”
“The sheriff owns that much land?” Lindsey asked.
“An inheritance, I believe,” Quade confirmed. “From a grandparent or something. He’s been leasing the land to farmers, getting barely enough to cover the taxes on it. If the rezoning goes through, we’re talking a lot of money. Sheriff Buck Adams will become a very rich man.”
Dylan’s heart beat erratically. “Money doesn’t matter to the sheriff. He’s happy with what he has, who he is.” Dylan had always admired that about the sheriff. His whole life he’d striven to be like him.
“Is he?” Quade’s lips twisted into a smirk.
Lindsey stood up and turned to Dylan. “He’s just needling you, Dylan. There’s no reason to believe the sheriff gives a damn one way or the other if the mall deal goes through.”
Dylan nodded, but panic streaked through his guts. Now he knew how Lindsey had felt when she’d learned of her mother’s past.
He pushed open the office door and strode out through the reception area. He had to get back to Winter Falls and learn if Evan Quade lied or spoke the horrible truth.
“DYLAN!” LINDSEY CALLED out as she raced down the sidewalk after his broad back. By the stiff ness in his shoulders and the speed of his stride, she knew he was agitated.
He stopped at the curb by his black SUV. But he didn’t turn back to her. She could appreciate that. She’d not been ready to face him in Quade’s office, either.
She’d completely given herself to this man who didn’t want her. But she’d already learned to live with that humiliation. She should have had the guts to face him despite the way he had slipped from her bed last night without a word. No goodbye. No thank you. She had awakened alone.
“Are you okay?” She tentatively laid her hand on his tense arm.
He jerked but didn’t pull away. “Yeah, you’ve got your story now. In a hurry to get back and print it?”
“I’m not printing this story. And I don’t know if I can get back to Winter Falls.” She squeezed his hard forearm. “I took the bus in and was hoping to catch a ride with you.”
“Quade didn’t play the gentle man and offer to give you a ride back after your exclusive?” A muscle jumped in his tense jaw.
Lindsey smiled over the bitterness in his tone. Her foolish heart at tempted to lift
with his show of jealousy. But men were often jealous of each other, and it had nothing to do with the woman.
She’d learned that, too. Her ex-fiancé had been jealous of Dylan even though he’d never cared about her.
She shrugged and admitted the truth. “He doesn’t like me much. He’d probably toss me out of the car while it was moving. He just asked me here to rattle you. He thinks you and I are involved.”
“Are we?” His gaze dropped to her hand on his arm. “Or was yesterday just an itch you’d had for ten years and finally decided to scratch?”
She laughed. “I should be the one asking that. I wanted you then, and I wanted you yesterday. Today, I don’t think so. You’re being an ass.”
When she would have flounced off, he caught her arm and pulled her close. “I’m sorry,” he whispered softly against her lips.
“Sorry for today or yesterday?” She braced her palms against his muscular chest, holding back just enough so that their breaths mingled but their lips didn’t touch.
“Both.” He groaned. “I shouldn’t have left like that, but your father—”
She rose on tiptoe and pressed a kiss against his lips. “You were embarrassed. I’m not sixteen anymore, Dylan. My father doesn’t care.”
“That’s not what he said when we met in the kitchen, but I don’t blame him.”
“My father talked to you—about what happened?” Now the embarrassment was all hers. Dylan nodded.
“What did he say?”
“Not to hurt you. You’ve had enough pain in your life already.”
She dropped her head to his chest, her arms hanging limply at her sides. “I’m tough. Did you find my mother?”
“No. We’re working on it. I can’t believe she could disappear this way.”
Lindsey sighed. “But she has. She might be crazy, but she’s smart.”
“Or she has help.”
Lindsey couldn’t think about what he might mean. She stroked her fingers along his tense jaw. “Are you okay?”
A ragged sigh blew through his lips. “I don’t know.”
“Are you going to talk to the sheriff?” She searched his face for signs of his anxiety. He had always idolized the sheriff.
“I have to.” His blue eyes glittered.