On Dangerous Ground

by Maggie Price

  She felt a mix of longing, restraint and carefully leashed passion when his mouth took hers again. The intimate privacy of the small, shadowy motel room added to her sense of security, but she knew it was Grant who made her feel safe.

  One of his hands settled on her hip, the other cupped the side of her neck. She knew he was taking care to make sure she could step away if she suddenly felt trapped.

  She didn’t feel trapped. She felt as if she were on the verge of freedom. She wanted to give. To take. To bask in the feel of Grant’s arms around her now that fear had receded into a hazy memory.

  Her hand moved, explored the smooth, hard planes of his shoulder. She marveled at the iron-hard tension she felt there, reveled at her response to his heated flesh. She could hear her own heartbeat raging in her chest, felt his heart pounding an answering echo against her breasts. His body was against hers, hard and lean; she felt his arousal against her belly.

  Need shot through her like a bolt of electricity, stunning her in its intensity.

  His mouth moved from hers to feast down the length of her throat with slow, cool, devastating control. His name escaped her lips in a soft moan.

  Too much, she thought dimly as her legs began to tremble. Too much, too fast. Still, it had been so long since she’d felt—just felt—that she couldn’t bring herself to step away. When his mouth found hers again, her fingers dug into his shoulder as much for balance as in response to the sharp-edged mix of emotions that raged inside her.

  It was Grant who eased out of the kiss. His gray gaze rested on her face with an unreadable intensity as he slid her clenched hand from his shoulder and pressed a soft kiss to her knuckles. “You’re not ready,” he said, his voice soft and husky.

  She looked up at him, shaken, yearning and just a little dismayed of what was happening inside her. “Not because I’m afraid.”

  “Good.” His eyes, dark and unreadable, stayed locked with hers as he slowly, carefully opened her fist, then pressed his mouth against her palm. “I won’t ever hurt you, Sky.”

  “I know.” She dragged in a ragged breath, trying to absorb the flood of sensation. Her head was spinning and she was pretty sure her lips were vibrating. “But you’re right. I’m not ready…to go beyond this. Not yet.”

  He rested his forehead against hers while he pulled his drooping shirt up and settled it on her shoulders. His movements were so slow and smoothly deliberate that she barely felt the unsteadiness in his hands.

  “When you are ready, all you have to do is let me know.”

  She pressed a hand to her stomach where a hard ball of need had lodged. “Believe me, you’ll be the first.”

  He wasn’t going to be able to let it go.

  The thought echoed through Grant’s brain as he shut the door to the motel room behind him. He stood unmoving in the still morning air in which the heat was already edging toward oppressive. Sky’s soft scent clung to his wrinkled shirt, filling his senses while the need to protect, to deliver some sort of justice for her deepened inside him.

  He shoved his fingers through his hair. He had the taste of her in his mouth, could still feel the soft silk of her flesh on his hands. The kisses they’d shared minutes before had left her trembling and, yes, wary. Of him.

  His teeth tightened on a curse as he thought about the abrupt vulnerability that had her digging her fingers into his shoulder. She was so sure of herself in her work, and so uncertain of the most basic aspect of her femininity. No matter how long it took, no matter what it took, he would make her sure again, give her back what that gutter-slime Kirk Adams had taken from her.

  Shoving his hands into the pockets of his slacks, Grant stared unseeingly across the parking lot at the heavy flow of traffic headed toward the turnoff for the prison rodeo. Until the moment he’d touched Sky, he had thought he had managed to snap control back into place. Thought he had convinced himself that the need to give Adams a taste of justice had been just knee-jerk reaction at hearing what the bastard had done to her. The intimacy he and Sky had just shared told him otherwise.

  He closed his eyes, hoping to shut out the memory of the previous night. Of the scream that had torn her out of the nightmare. Of her pale-as-death face. Of the ragged sobs that had wracked her body while she clung to him. Instead, the horror she’d suffered swam even more vividly in his brain.

  He felt his blood heat all over again and he struggled against the fury that intensified with a sense of his own impotence. It was as if the closer he and Sky became, the stronger his need to do something—anything—to right the wrongs she’d suffered.

  Shoving on his sunglasses, Grant stalked across the motel’s parking lot. The main legacy of yesterday evening’s fire was the lingering smell of doused ash, sour and acrid, that hung in the still air and left a taste in his mouth. His thoughts were just as bitter.

  Somehow he needed to regain his objectivity. Needed to push away the anger and deal with the facts of what Sky had suffered. He and Sam hadn’t closed every homicide case they’d worked. Most, but not all. Sometimes they’d known who the bad guy was, but the evidence wasn’t there, so the do-wrong walked. That was a reality a cop had to accept and live with on an all-too-frequent basis. Always before, Grant had managed to put that aspect of the job into perspective, managed to shuffle the sense of injustice into a part of his brain where emotion played no part.

  He was pretty sure no amount of shuffling was going to strip his emotions from what Sky had endured. Something. Dammit, he had to do something.

  The thought pounded in his head, masking the sound of the traffic as he jogged across McAlester’s main street.

  He wished he could talk to Sam. Wished his partner was around to help establish rules for the mental chess game that had lodged itself in Grant’s mind. Sam had taught him to use people’s predictability to determine their moves, but in this case it was his own future moves Grant couldn’t seem to get a bead on. He needed to balance the anger that churned inside him with the code of behavior he’d sworn to uphold when he pinned on the badge. Problem was, he didn’t know how to do that.

  He let out a long breath into the hot summer morning. If Sam was in a position to listen to the mental war waging inside him, his deceased partner wasn’t sending any advice on how to win that war.

  “Thanks, buddy,” Grant muttered.

  He needed time to regroup, he told himself as he walked across the parking lot of the convenience store where he’d bought supplies the previous evening. With time, his perspective would level out. Objectivity would return. His icy fury would diminish, his stomach would unknot. He had to trust that.

  He passed the diner where he and Sky had eaten dinner. Glancing through the big front window, Grant noted that the place was packed. As were the drugstore and barbershop he passed.

  He checked his watch as he turned a corner and a white cinder-block building came into view. The hand-painted sign that stretched across the building’s front read Wade’s Garage. The two overhead doors were up, revealing a large workshop from which raucous country music blasted. In one stall, a mechanic wearing brown overalls twisted a wrench beneath the underbelly of a dusty black pickup truck suspended on a hydraulic lift. Beside the building, there was a large wire-fenced compound where jobs done or waiting sat in haphazard rows. The unmarked cruiser was parked in the compound near the gate, sunlight reflecting off its brown roof.

  Grant hoped the fact that the car was parked in the compound signaled that work on it had already been completed.

  The mechanic glanced across his shoulder and gave a nod to acknowledge Grant’s presence. Setting the wrench on top of a rolling toolbox, the man walked out into the sunlight. Grant got three instant physical impressions: carrot-colored hair, freckles, beer belly.

  “Help you?” the man asked, wiping one hand on the thigh of his grease-stained overalls. Wade was embroidered in dingy red across the chest pocket.

  Grant introduced himself, then swept a hand in the direction of the cruiser. “That’
s my car. When Hank towed it in last night, he said he would leave you a note to check it first thing this morning.”

  “He did.” Wade scratched his mop of hair that looked even more reddish orange beneath the bright sun. “I did.”

  “What was wrong?”

  “What was wrong still’s wrong. Can’t fix her.”

  Grant silently cursed the city’s stringent budget that so often obliged cops to settle for ancient, less-than-efficient equipment. “Is there a part you need?”

  “Yeah.” Rubbing his protruding belly, Wade looked at the cruiser in grim assessment. “A new engine. That’ll do the trick, but it’ll take a lot of time and money to get her going.”

  Grant’s eyes narrowed behind the lenses of his sunglasses. “The car needs a new engine?”

  “Yep. I got a look at the radio in the dash. You’re a cop, right?”

  “Right.”

  Wade nodded. “Somebody poured sugar into the carburetor. Maybe someone who doesn’t like cops walked by the car and saw the radio. She’s got a city government tag on her, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Wade held up a grimy hand. “Yesterday you started her up, she drove okay for a few miles, then she went into a coughing fit, right?”

  Grant planted a hand on his hip. In deference to the heat, he’d left his sport coat and gun in the motel room. His badge was in his back pocket. “Right.”

  “Once the engine cooled, the sugar caramelized. Stuff’s all through it, just like sludge. When I opened the hood this morning, it smelled like somebody’d burnt dessert. I checked the carburetor, unhooked the fuel line. Looks like someone poured caramel into it.”

  “Sugar…” While he formulated a time line in his head, Grant shifted his gaze across the street to the post office where the flag in front hung limp in the still, hot air.

  “How long would the car have run after the sugar was poured in the carburetor?” he asked, shifting his gaze back to Wade.

  “Depends on how much sugar they used. At most, a couple of miles.” Wade lifted a shoulder. “I suppose it could’ve been kids that done it. Last Halloween we had a couple of cars wind up here with sweet insides. The cops never did catch ’em. The owners of the cars were plenty mad about it, I tell you.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Grant said through his teeth, his thoughts shifting to the previous afternoon. The cruiser had run without a hitch on the drive from the city, had shown no sign of engine trouble when he and Sky left the state prison. After that, they’d stopped at a café. The parking lot there had been full, so he’d parked the cruiser in the back. He and Sky had both gone inside; he’d stood in line to buy soft drinks while she washed off the grease she’d gotten on her hands when Jason Whitebear made a grab for her evidence kit.

  The evidence kit that had barely survived the fire…along with Sky.

  Suddenly, yesterday’s bizarre string of events took on a darker, more sinister tint. For the first time, Grant turned a suspicious eye toward the fire. The fire chief had determined the cause was a short in the air-conditioning unit in Sky’s room. A room she wouldn’t have been in if the cruiser hadn’t broken down. Had the air-conditioning unit malfunctioned, or been purposely sabotaged? If so, by whom? Someone who had a reason to want Ellis Whitebear’s blood sample destroyed? Worse, someone who wanted Sky hurt or dead? A combination of both?

  The possibilities shot a sudden, profound wariness into Grant’s system. “I’m going to have a lab tech go over that cruiser. Don’t let anybody else touch it.”

  When he glanced back at the wire-fenced compound, Wade raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare. “Don’t guess I know anybody else who’d want to touch it.”

  Making a mental list of what needed to be done, Grant turned and jogged back in the direction of the motel. His first priority was to get back to Sky. Fast.

  “Someone poured sugar in the cruiser’s carburetor?” Sky asked as she dropped her contact lens case into her purse that sat on the unmade bed.

  “Yeah.” From where he stood, Grant could smell the tang of the soap she’d used in the shower. He took a deep breath and realized he was still feeling the effects of the relief that had rolled over him when he opened the motel room door and found her safe.

  She wrinkled her nose. “What sort of damage does that do to a car?”

  “Gums up the system,” he answered. “To an engine, it’s the mechanical equivalent of a blood clot.”

  “But who…?”

  “I don’t know.” Turning abruptly, he strode to the chest of drawers, retrieved the holstered Glock and jammed it onto his belt. “But I’m damn well going to find out.”

  Sky lowered onto the edge of the bed, frowning as she pleated the edge of the sheet between her fingers. “I guess what Wade said could be right—that some kids played a prank.”

  “Yeah. Problem is, my gut tells me otherwise.” Grant stared across the room at her, his jaw set. “I need to call Lieutenant Ryan and give him a rundown on what’s happened. After that, we’ll check out. I’m going to make sure Delbert puts that burned air-conditioning unit into storage until someone from the State Fire Marshal’s Office can get here to check it.”

  Sky’s fingers froze against the sheet. “Why? The fire chief here said a short in the unit started the fire.”

  “That’s probably what happened. I want to know exactly why the unit shorted out.”

  “You mean…? You think the fire might not have been an accident?”

  His jaw tightened when he saw the color drain out of her face. The last thing he wanted to do was frighten her.

  “Is that what you think, Grant?” she asked when he remained silent.

  “Dammit, I don’t know what to think. About anything.” The words came out on a new crest of anger he hadn’t realized had been building inside him.

  “The rape included.” She raised a hand, let it fall back into her lap. Her pale skin lent an air of fragileness to the delicate lines of her face. “I saw it in your eyes this morning. You don’t know what to think about the rape.”

  His hands clenched against his thighs. “I know exactly what to think about the rape,” he said quietly.

  “I don’t blame you.” Her eyes had gone as dull as her voice. “I understand.”

  Her statement had him hesitating. No way was he going to share with her the violent thoughts he’d had about Kirk Adams. If she knew what was raging through his mind where that bastard was concerned, it would scare her. Hell, it scared him.

  He took a cautious step toward her, then another. “What is it you think you understand?”

  She turned her head and stared out the room’s lone window. The dark fall of her hair streamed across her shoulders, a stark contrast against the white halter top. “I learned in my therapy sessions that some men are unable to handle a relationship with a woman who’s been raped. Maybe you’re one of those men.”

  A blow to the side of his head would have had less impact. “Sky, that’s not—”

  “I…understand if you are.” She remet his gaze. “There are people—men and women—who can’t help but wonder how a rape victim could get herself into such a situation, or if maybe, just maybe, she provoked the attack.” When she spoke again, her voice was thick with the tears that glistened in her eyes. “They may even wonder if she enjoyed the experience.”

  Grant closed the distance between them, pulled her to her feet and gathered her close. “You were drugged, for God’s sake! Kidnapped.” He had to fight to keep his voice even, struggled to keep the hand steady that he stroked down the long fall of her dark hair. “Totally defenseless. You were a victim, Sky. A smart one. You survived.”

  When he felt her body tremble, he leaned his head back. As he thumbed a stray tear from her cheek, he silently cursed himself. He’d had a lot of dealings, both on and off the job, with women caught up in traumas, but with Sky things were different. She’d knocked him off balance to the extent that he was stumbling around like an i
nept idiot.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you told me last night,” he said quietly. “What I’m trying to come to terms with is the fact that no one was there to protect you. That you never got justice.”

  “I accepted that a long time ago. I had to.”

  He pressed a kiss against her temple as he continued to comb his hand through her hair. “Something like that is hard for a cop to deal with. I’m used to the bad guy getting caught. And punished.”

  She settled her cheek against his shoulder, slid her arms around his waist. “That didn’t happen in my case. I had to learn to live with it.”

  Grant closed his eyes against the vision of her battered and bloodied. At that instant, he knew he would never be able to shake that image—just like he hadn’t been able to shake his feelings for her during the past six months. He’d tried. God knew, he’d tried.

  “I have to figure out in my head how to deal with what happened to you,” he said carefully.

  This time it was Sky who leaned back and gazed up at him with blue eyes that still shimmered with tears. “I guess we both have things to work out.”

  “Yeah.” His unsettled emotions tightened his mouth. “But I do know one thing.”

  “What?”

  “No one is ever going to hurt you again. I swear it.”

  Chapter 8

  “I think I finally have this espresso maker figured out,” Judith Mirren said, raising her voice over the hissing and bubbling emanating from the gleaming black machine tucked into an alcove on her kitchen counter. Looking over her shoulder, the psychiatrist gave Sky a smile. “On the phone you sounded rested and happy. You look that way, too.”

  “I am.” Sky set her purse on the tile floor and eased onto a long-legged stool at the kitchen’s center island. “A lot has happened in the past day and a half.”

  As she spoke, movement caught Sky’s eye. Sigmund slunk out of nowhere and began brushing back and forth against his mistress’s legs, arching his back and purring like a little motorboat.